New: "Getting Started" TurtleBot Guide for Developers Interested in Robotics

[Mark Silliman]

Austin Meyers, Melissa Eaton and I have been working on an open source, "TurtleBot & ROS 101" tutorial series.  It's primarily targeted at web developers with little or no robotic experience.

http://learn.turtlebot.com/

It includes tutorials on writing web apps (compatible with IOS / Android) that control TurtleBot.

Thoughts and contributions are greatly appreciated.  Also, please share the project.

This is an open-source project which can be forked here: https://github.com/markwsilliman/turtlebot-tutorial (powered with Jekyll & GitHub pages).  All content, videos & images are available for you to use as you see fit.

GOAL

As a member of both the open-source robotics and web development communities, my goal is to encourage web developers to start learning robotics. As you know, web developers have a long tradition of embracing emerging technologies. We just recently saw this happen with 3D printers and I would love to see the same with robotics.

Keep in mind that web development today is often completed without even a basic knowledge of installing linux, so a true hand-holding experience is required for widespread adoption. This project provides the hand-holding (including installing linux from scratch, loading ssh, basic python concepts, extensive troubleshooting, etc.) that might not be appropriate in the ROS wiki.

I believe TurtleBots can be as common as MakerBots if a series of articles is available for developers with little to no robotics experience.

If we can give developers a taste of ROS’ power in a short period of time, they’ll invest the time to learn ROS properly. The learn.turtlebot.com articles link back to the ROS wiki extensively. My goal is for a mass of developers to learn the basics first and be able to move on as effective users and collaborators of the wiki.

Cheers,

Mark Silliman

[Román Navarro García]

Good job!

[Tarik Kelestemur]

It is great to see that you started this project. As you mentioned it can be tricky to get started with TurtleBot and ROS. Other alternatives like arduino-based robots can teach people intro to robotics but they mostly stay only on that level. TurtleBot is a low-cost and powerful robot that can create great applications with a large community and your works will definitely will do important impact. Thank you for starting and maintaining this project.

One suggestion: You should send this project to robotics blogs and sites like spectrum.ieee.org robohub.org but I guess you've already done that :)

Regards,

Tarik.

26 Şubat 2015 Perşembe 02:20:19 UTC+2 tarihinde Mark Silliman yazdı:

[Mark Silliman]

Román - Thanks!

Tarik - Thanks as well!  Strongly agreed.  Arduino is an excellent platform as well.  Evan Ackerman from spectrum is on vacation but plans to write an article about the project upon his return.   Robohub will feature the project late this week / early next (article in progress).  We've also received press from: http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/learn-to-program-robots-for-free-on-your-own-time/ and http://t3n.de/news/roboter-programmieren-tutorial-596450/

Thanks!

Mark

[Arif Rahman]

Oh I was benefiting from your site even before you announce it here! Thanks a lot! Very well-written and great content. 

Arif