The ROSCon organizing committee has announced they will be adding 3 hour workshops this year to the program. A hands-on workshop on MoveIt 2 has specifically been requested by Geoffrey Biggs and Victor is pushing for this also.
I think the most interesting topic to everyone will be a hands-on tutorial using some amount of MoveIt 2.0. This could be a 30 minute introduction talk (while people install missing code/binaries) followed by 2.5 hours of step-by-step walk through of using MoveIt to control a simulated MARA robot (the first ROS 2.0 robot arm).
Topics we can ideally teach hands on:
How to use MoveIt “directly” via C++ rather than the MoveGroup abstraction, depending on how far along MoveIt 2.0 development is and ROS 2.0’s new actionlib interface.
Demonstrate TrajOpt in MoveIt, assuming our GSoC student and intern this summer are successful in the port.
Hands-on usage of the Task Constructor, a follow up from Robert and Michael’s talk last year at ROSCon
YES! All 3 of those topics sound perfect. Although depending on the experience level of the attendees, getting through more than one of those might be hard.
I would definitely appreciate a tutorial on Task Constructor.
Perhaps we could even use this time to give a how-to on contributing to MoveIt: identifying an issue / missing documentation, modifying code in a fork’s branch, submitting a pull request with detailed descriptions, etc. ?
No new ideas, but I second Ian’s idea about contributing to MoveIt, and Jon’s about the difficulty of getting to all of these topics. Perhaps focusing on 2 max would be good.
Since all these topics could be beneficial to different users, but as pointed out it may be difficult through them all, we could potentially divide the attendees into two groups during the workshop, depending on their experience and priorities. These groups could run in parallel on different topics, rather than consecutively, to make sure everyone gets the most value out of the workshops. We could also record the sessions and make them available after ROSCon for those that can’t attend.
Thanks @davetcoleman for taking the lead and organizing this. Acutronic Robotics will be happy to contribute.
We’d be happy to participate on this or lead it directly. There’s a high chance that the tutorials could run on a real robot live as well, which will make the overall experience better for the audience IMHO.