One last check of dropbox (May 20 2012)
I have now finished grading everything that I have, with the notable exception of the final exams and the graduate student papers. This is a good opportunity to make one final check to ensure I've recorded everything correctly in the department dropbox.

If everything goes according to plan, final grades should be posted by Friday. However, because I'll be traveling this week, it's conceivable that there could be unanticipated delays.

Have a safe summer.

LaserScan notes (Feb 27 2012)
I just posted a quick diagram that might help you understand the LaserScan messages that are published by the simulated TurtleBot.

Issue with camera topics with TurtleBot in Gazebo (Feb 27 2012)
It appears that a recent update to the ROS system is causing some problems with the publication of the robot's visual data on /camera/image_raw. However, this does not seem to effect /scan which contains the range data you really need to complete Project 2. I will continue to investigate this. In the meantime, you may wish to omit the camera display from your rviz setup.

Team Assignments (Feb 6 2012)
Group assignments for the remaining projects in this course appear below. I was able to satisfy most (but, unfortunately, not all) of the preferences you submitted. These teams are listed in no particular order.
Group A E. Randall, G. DeBruin, R. Brown, D. Weston
Group B M. Base, L. Roselli, M. Reynolds, R. McFadden
Group C J. Russell, K. Brown, A. Bellotti, D. Brown
Group D C. Bassett, R. Doe, W. Lemasters, E. Wood
Group E O. Todd, A. DePriest, R. Bracey, J. Kirby
These can still be changed in the next few days, as long as (1) you arrange the changes amongst yourselves and (2) the result still has 5 groups of 4 people each. My apologies for any spelling mistakes in the table.

Known issue with rosdep (Jan 26 2012)
On at least some of the lab computers, you may notice that the command "rosdep install", which appears in the BuildPackages tutorial, generates errors and/or asks for your password to try to install some new software. This error is harmless, and can safely be ignored. If fact, the turtlesim package and its rum-time dependencies should already be installed, so you can safely skip the entire section on "Building Dependencies" in that tutorial.

Office hours Friday and Monday (Jan 26 2012)
I am planning to be around to answer questions about Project 1 on Friday from 2 until 4 and Monday from 2:30 until 4:30. During those times, I should be either in my office, or in the Linux lab.

No class today (Jan 19 2012)
Bad news: Class will be cancelled today. Sorry for the late notice. I hope you'll use this time to make some progress on Project 1.

Linux notes (Jan 16 2012)
I've just posted a short collection of links to help you (re-)learn some basic Linux skills. We won't talk about these things directly in class, but they will be important for the programming assignments, of which the first will be coming soon.

Welcome (Jan 10 2012)
Hi everyone. Announcements for this course will appear here. If you use an RSS reader, you might be interested in subscribing to the associated feed.