teaching_robots_navigation

Teaching robot navigation

Table of contents

• Installation
• Introduction
• ROS
• Gazebo and Rviz

• 🤔❓how does a submarine navigate underwater without GPS

• navigation
• odometry

• Rio Tinto case study

• SLAM

• LLMs and robots

• Additional material

• indoor drones and GPS denied
• humanoid robots
• Co-operative robots and multi-robot systems

• Competence vs. Performance in robotics

• Evaluation

• Safety and Ethics

• 🎮 🛠️ Practical

• Practical hello world and Python code and here
• Practical with 3 nodes and Python code

• Practicals with LLMs and robots

• practical sheet for this week available to students. Model answers to the tasks are available here as the week_3_solution package, and answers for exercises can be found here

Timetable

Week 8 - Navigation and path planning (Soumya) [3 lectures]

• w/c 23/November
• L18
• L19
• P9 (Thursday): Mapping, localisation, and navigation
• Creating a map with ROS2 SLAM Toolbox
• Use Nav2 stack for localisation and navigation of TurtleBots in simulation
• Create maps and use Nav2 for multi-robot systems in simulation
• L20

Week 9 - SLAM (Soumya) [2 lectures]

• w/c 30/November
• L21
• L22
• P10 (Thursday): Autonomous navigation
• Use of Nav2 Simple Commander API for navigation
• Use of ROS2 TF API to listen and query transforms
• Change parameters of ROS nodes at runt-ime using CLI and Python API

Week 10 - vSLAM/LLMs (Soumya) [3 lectures]

• w/c 7/December

• Module evaluation survey will come out around this time

• L23

• L24

• P11 (Thursday): Visual SLAM

Run Stella-VSLAM and RTAB-Map demos

• Visualise vSLAM data using RViz

• L25

VLE

• Link to the 2025 VLE site

• The new one will be here, but needs updates here

Solutions (private)

• Solutions

Checkin codes

• Checkin codes

Timetables and semesters

• Timetables and semesters

Declaration

Parts of this course material are generated using generative AI. I take full responsibility for all content and have verified it. Lots of the text and material are also heavily inspired by other sources which are all detailed in this document. I take and make no claims to originality. These are just to be used as teaching notes.

Acknowledgements

Dr. John Oyekan

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