Note: This is an email query I received from an undergraduate student who wanted to ask me about how to get into robotics research (SLAM and path planning). I am …
A practical introduction to pose-graph SLAM with ROS
Note: This is a live article and as I get time I will update it… In this post, we are going to understand the pose-graph SLAM approach with ROS where …
How To: Get ground truth pose data in ROS Gazebo
Sometimes you might need to get the robot’s actual position to compare your state estimation code. Copy paste the contents of this file (plugin_code) into your urdf description file. It …
Can a robot drive 100s of Kilometers with < 1 m Error without GPS?
A considerably difficult aspect of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is the problem of uncertainty constrained long term point-to-point navigation where global loop closures to eliminate estimation biases may not …
How To: Running Ubuntu and ROS in a Virtual Machine on macOS / OS X with 3D Acceleration (Gazebo)
I primarily use a Mac for my work, but since a I do a lot of robotics I have to switch over to Ubuntu to use ROS. Having a linux …
How To: Get depth (X,Y,Z) of a 2D pixel from PointCloud2 or Kinect Data
Surprisingly there is no clear cut instruction anywhere. My questions was, if I tracked an image feature from the Kinect, how would I know its 3D position? I wanted to …
How To Setup Kinect with ROS and RGBD SLAM
I recently setup a Kinect with ROS for SLAM but the instructions are all spread out. So, in this tutorial we go through the steps required to setup a Microsoft …
Autonomous Flight for Parrot AR Drone
Somebody recently watched this video of my previous research and asked me: “I saw a YouTube video of a project you did, and I’m fascinated with making a drone autonomous. I …
Qualcomm CES 2016 Future of Autonomous Drones
Qualcomm recently published a video of the project that I worked on during my internship at Qualcomm Research. This video shows the capabilities that we integrated into a small drone …
Reasons Why You Should Be Thinking of a Career in Robotics
Are you an engineer at that messy point in your life when you’re thinking about the universe and your career. Maybe, you are in high school and thinking of a …