I can answer some of these questions right now, and I think these show that a course that teaches how to use Autoware and how each major component works would have benefits beyond the AD community.
Note that the answers below are with regards to what is theoretically possible but which may not currently be technically possible without doing some message porting, ripping code out of its repository, or similar. We aim to remove these barriers to reuse outside of Autoware.
Yes to HD maps if you are happy to treat your area as a road network (see below about the planner).
Yes to NDT. If you have a point cloud map you can use NDT to localise in it, although there may be some assumptions being made that Iām not aware of such as rotation of the lidar around X and Y.
Localisation using NDT is independent of the HD map, which is what defines road infrastructure. We donāt currently have any localisation capability based on the HD map but we are aware of the concept and may implement something in the future.
Yes, it is dependent on having an HD map of a road network to plan within. However you can treat many areas that you want to navigate within as a āroadā network. Delivery robots in a hospital or office building, for example, may prefer fixed lanes rather than free space planning, at least for part of the delivery route such as corridors. Robots that drive on a footpath would also be a good fit for using a āroadā network.
Also, Autoware.Auto will include a limited free-space planner for some functionality, such as parking the car.
The planners are for autonomous vehicles, so they are by necessity designed for Ackermann-type vehicles.
Yes, you can use it right now if you have a 3D LiDAR sensor and want to get bounding boxes of Euclidean clusters. We intend to maintain this reusability going forward.
I think pre-recorded would be better for the lecture portions. We could run live sessions for exercises with a prerequisite of participation being that they have watched the lecture.
Although this is all starting to sound very Udacity so maybe we should be talking to them about providing a new courseā¦
The last years as a product owner in robotics showed me that the right mindset, development processes and team structures are a key aspect to build a complex robotic system.
@Tobias thanks. This would be excellent. Could you maybe do this as part of the first lecture - Development Environment (I have for now put down Apex.AI for it but would be very happy if you do it)?
Then you could present your points also in terms of what we already have in Autoware.Auto, e.g.:
I got the confirmation from the 10/16 lecturers and it is very likely that the remaining 6 will confirm as well. Which means that we will proceed with the course
That we host an/or mirror all of this content on the ROS 2 wiki. From the userās perspective having a centralized resource is the most helpful thing we can do.
We avoid any sort of LMS/Courseware unless weāre willing to put in the effort to develop the associated content like quizzes, tests, homework, projects. The real value of coursework is that it can become a turn-key solution for educators.
The data we do have indicates that videos are best for covering ROS basics. We should shoot to build tutorials/how to/explainers first and then use that content to record a video. The benefit of this approach is that makes the underlying content updateable, searchable, and discoverable.
We asked Ricardo from the TheConstructSim to support with the logistics (work with the lecturers to deliver the material, review the material (markdown and video), help with the recordings, upload the video, collect the feedback
Each lecture starts with a recap from prior class.
@Dejan_Pangercic to check if we need a new .aderc volume for the class
Class start date: May 11 2020
ROS 2 101 Syllabus Proposal:
General introduction of ROS 2 (why we decided to write it,
architecture, who is using it, ā¦)
Why is ROS 2 better suitable for AD than ROS 1:
Industrial-grade middleware DDS (QoS, efficient support for large data, data and node
level failure handling)
Different communication patterns (callback+executor, waitset)
rclcpp_lifecycle (deterministic startup, enables node level failure handling, enables split of the memory management between non-steady and steady phase)
Written in modern C++14
Security
High architecture and code quality level (because of CI, linters, test frameworks, design documents)
Supported on VxWorks and QNX RTOSes
Hands-on:
How to create a ROS 2 package
How to create a pub/sub example, demonstrate some of features from above (e.g. security, rclcpp_lifecycle, QoS, ā¦)
We agreed with Kat from OSRF that we will have 1 .md file for every lecture which will then be used when making the video and when the students will want to replicate the class material
I will talk to Josh about this. We were planning our next release to be the complete AVP work. That doesnāt mean we canāt do a point release, though.
I can clean up the documentation, but keep in mind that there is a difference in documentation for teaching and documentation for reference. I will look at making a section for teaching materials to keep things better organised.
@Dejan_Pangercic Action Item for me to find out about translation of courseware (videos, documentation) into other languages. Based on Autoware users, these should start with Japanese and Chinese.
After our discussions the other night I got tasked with coming up with a way to potentially add the course content to the ROS 2 wiki. What we were looking for in particular was a way to generate course slides in restructured text so the core content could be mirrored on the ROS 2 wiki. I did a bit of research and a project called Landslide along with the Prince pdf generator appears to be workable solution. Prince is free for non-commercial use so I think we should be ok (we would only use it to generate the actual slides).
I should have some time on Monday to see if I canāt generate some templates and an outline of courses on the ROS 2 wiki along with the requisite license information we discussed.
The following markdown generates the slides linked below. I will see if I can turn of syntax highlighting and create a lightweight theme.
# Landslide
---
# Overview
Generate HTML5 slideshows from markdown, ReST, or textile.
Landslide is primarily written in Python, but it's themes use:
- HTML5
- Javascript
- CSS
---
# Code Sample
Landslide supports code snippets
!python
def log(self, message, level='notice'):
if self.logger and not callable(self.logger):
raise ValueError(u"Invalid logger set, must be a callable")
if self.verbose and self.logger:
self.logger(message, level)
looks like a great tool to work together online on markdown files with live preview.
This could be helpful for pair generation of markdown files.
It also supports the slide syntax you a mentioning.
I will try it out this weekend for my slides and give you some feedback.
Edit:
It works actually great. Here some example slides on my part with a flow chart create with graphviz copied from the template. Everybody with the link can change the document. You can also create comments in the preview mode. https://hackmd.io/@Ly0n/SJ4FByjFI/edit