MRC/Tutorials/Introduction

During the Embedded Motion Control course you will encounter many tools, systems and concepts that you are currently unfamiliar with. This may be daunting at first, but soon you will notice the strengths of each of the tools and find out how they work together to allow you to program a real, physical robot. The following tutorials are aimed at getting you up speed with these tools as fast as possible.

Let's start with an overview of the tools we will be using and the roles they play within your project:

• Ubuntu: the Operating System we will be using. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution. The latest long term support release is 14.04, but we will be using 12.04.
• ROS: (Robot Operating System) is the robot software framework we will be using for managing your software and dealing with the communication between different software modules. ROS comes with a large amount of robot software that can be used out of the box, including device drivers, libraries, low- and high-level software, visualizers and more.
• C++: is the programming language we will be using. This means that your program, or code, will be written in C++.
• Subversion: or SVN, is a software versioning and revision control system. You will use it to share your project code between different group members, while maintaining a file version history. Think of it as Dropbox.
• Qt Creator: an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C++. All you need to create a C++ program is a simple text editor and a C++ compiler. However, it can become difficult to manage large projects, trace back where compile errors are coming from, etc. Think of Qt Creator as a very advanced text editor that understands C++ and makes programming C++ a lot nicer.
• Gazebo: the robot simulator we will be using to simulate the PICO robot. You will have limited testing time on the real robot, but this simulator will allow you to test your PICO program on your computer.

Alright, let's get our hands dirty. Time to install Ubuntu on your computer.