ROS, TURTLES AND ROSVERSION

COMMAND LINE CHECK FOR ROS VERSION

A command line to check ROS version installed,

......1.4.9 makes it a diamondback release 

TURTLE REFERENCE 

All ROS distributions have a Turtle reference. Box Turtle, C Turtle, Diamondback .....

 

The reasons cited for such are;

• Reference to one of the first mobile robots made; William Grey Walter's Elmer and Elsie - they looked like turtles.

• LOGO Turtle, probably the simplest GUI based simulations for navigation. ROS also has a package very similar to the LOGO Turtle and it is often recommended as a tutorial for newbies.

• Other interesting reasons are, Turtle World and "It's turtles all the way down"

REFERENCES
(1) ROS Distributions

(2) I thank Gonçalo Cabrita and Ken Conley at ros-users@code.ros.org

DABBLING WITH THE I-BOT

I-BOT@BIT RANCHI

At BIT, Ranchi there are 11 I-Bot Robot.
 

These robots are made by triindia and build on a Philips 8051 microcontroller. However much to my annoyance, each robot is merely equipped with 2 sets of light sensors and can only be used for very simple experiments (viz.obstacle avoidance and line following).

The programming is done in C

These experiments are often included as a introductory robotics lab for postgraduate engineering students. 

2 CARTOONS

2 CARTOONS 
 

I came across 2 cartoons while documenting various different algorithms for mobile robot path planning. Both these cartoons makes an agile researcher of this field squint and follow it up with a smirk (or script a LOL !) .

The first one is from willowgarage .

While the second one is from Arkin's book .

Both these cartoons succinctly illustrate the issues in the 'apparently simple' philosophy of path planning.