Robot Operating System syllabus

ROS Overview: Introduction to robot software development, History and evolution of ROS, Comparison of ROS with other robotics frameworks (Including Webots and CoppeliaSim), Overview of ROS architecture (Master, Nodes, Parameter Server, ROS Core), Applications of ROS in industry and research. Environment Setup: Setting up a ROS development environment on Linux (Ubuntu), installing and configuring ROS distributions, creating and managing ROS workspaces (catkin and colcon), introduction to ROS packages and package management (package.xml, CMakeLists.txt), environment variable setup, basic ROS command-line tools (roscd, rosls, rospack, rosrun, rosnode, rostopic, rosservice, rosparam).

Core Concepts: Nodes, Topics, Messages and services in ROS, ROS Communication: Publishers and subscribers (asynchronous), ROS services (synchronous request-reply), ROS actions (long-running tasks), ROS parameters and parameter server, ROS master and roscore functionality. Messages and Data Definition: ROS standard message types, Data types and custom message definition with ROS messages (.msg), Service definition files (.srv), Action definition files (. action), introduction to ROS names and naming conventions, Remapping of topics and nodes, ROS bags for data logging and playback (Advanced rosbag analysis workflows – e.g., filtering, time-syncing, extracting data for ML).

Language and Node Creation: Introduction to ROS with Python (rospy) and C++ (roscpp), Creating simple ROS nodes in both languages, Node initialization and shutdown, Rate control and sleep functions, Logging and debugging output. Communication Implementation: Publishing and subscribing to topics (Publisher, Subscriber, callback functions), Sending and receiving ROS service requests (ServiceClient and ServiceServer), Working with ROS libraries and APIs, Time handling in ROS (ros::Time, rospy. Time), Timers and periodic callbacks, Exception handling in ROS nodes.

Robot Navigation: Robot navigation challenges and solutions (SLAM, path planning, localization, obstacle avoidance), ROS navigation frameworks (ROS Navigation Stack, MoveIt, Cartographer), Overview of costmaps, Odometry and sensor fusion, AMCL for localization, ROS enabled autonomous robot movement. Robot Perception: Importance of robot perception for navigation and interaction, ROS integration with sensors like LiDAR, cameras, IMUs, and radar, Robot perception (object detection, segmentation, classification), How robots "see" and interpret their environment, Introduction to computer vision libraries in ROS (OpenCV, PCL), Camera calibration.

Tools and Simulation: Introduction to ROS tools (rviz, rqt, rqt_graph, rqt_console, rqt_plot, rosbag, Foxglove Studio) for visualization, Debugging and logging, Working with robot simulations in ROS (Gazebo, comparison with Webots and CoppeliaSim), URDF for robot description, TF transform library (tf2) for coordinate frames, Introduction to robot navigation frameworks (MoveIt) and perception pipelines. Hardware Interfacing: Introduction to robot sensors (proximity, light, contact) and actuators (DC motors, servo motors, stepper motors), Interfacing sensors and actuators with ROS drivers (UART, I2C, SPI, USB), Reading sensor data and controlling actuators through ROS nodes, Introduction to micro- ROS and rosserial for embedded systems, NVIDIA Jetson and TensorRT for edge inference, CI/CD basics using GitHub Actions / GitLab CI for robotics projects, Docker + ROS for reproducible setups, ROS 2 basics.