Post 2: First time with ROS

Shey's experience with ROS/Labs: 

By going through several parts of the ROS tutorial, I developed a basic understanding of nodes, topics, parameters, and services, and how they relate to each other. More hands-on practice will be needed to deepen this understanding. Operating the robot during lab helped me see which movements are already encoded, which gave me a clearer sense of how our robots function. Having this foundation will be useful as we move forward with the design process and define what needs to be built.

Tony's experience with ROS/Labs: 

In Lab 1, I learned about the basic ROS commands, but am not quite familiar with them where I can write them from memory. For Lab 2, I thought it was fun learning about Stretch and its capabilities and completing different tasks with it such as picking objects up. For me, the most challenging part of learning ROS was remembering the specific commands for sourcing and setting up the code, and the most challenging part of using the Stretch Robot was getting it do specific tasks that required multiple steps.

Diana's experience with ROS/Labs:

Last week in the lab, we learned about ROS2 environment settings, nodes, topics, etc., and this week in the lab, we used an actual Stretch robot with a controller. Learning the concepts of ROS2 using Turtlesim was useful because we could see them in action directly through simulation. Also, using a Stretch robot directly helped us understand how the robot works. The most challenging part of learning ROS2 was understanding all the new concepts. As for using the Stretch robot, the hardest part was remembering the functions of each button on the controller.

Evan's experience with ROS/Labs:

I learned the basic concepts of ROS through many tutorials from lab1. I like how the different components of a robot are abstracted into higher-level ones like topics and nodes. However, there are a lot of new things to learn and probably memorize, and I think I still need more time to deepen my understanding of them. In lab2 we learned basic commands to teleop and control the Stretch robot. I really enjoyed the experience of playing with such an advanced robot system. The lab also helped me a lot to learn what Stretch is capable of so that we can better scope our project.