Summary

This chapter covered several important topics. It started with some of the basics of robotics, for readers who needed a bit more background. We talked about common robot parts, such as sensors, computers, and motors/actuators. We discussed the subsumption architecture in more depth and showed how it helps the robot arbitrate between responding to different events and commands. The next section covered the software setup for running the robot, including the offboard development environment and the onboard Jetson Nano computer environments. We set up the ROS and installed the Python tools.

The final section covered ROS 2 and explained what it is and what it does for us. ROS 2 is a middleware layer that lets us build modular components and multiple single-use programs, rather than having to lump everything into one executable. ROS also has logging, visualization, and debugging tools that help our task of designing a complex robot. ROS 2 is also a wonderful repository of additional...