Dyno Robotics - ROS2 Course

Welcome to the Dyno Robotics ROS2 Course repository! This comprehensive learning environment provides hands-on experience with ROS2 (Robot Operating System 2) through two progressive simulation platforms designed to take you from basic concepts to advanced robotics applications.

🎯 Course Overview

This course is structured as a practical journey through ROS2 development, featuring two distinct robot simulation environments that build upon each other:

Session 1: Dynoturtle 🐢

Dynoturtle provides a gentle introduction to ROS2 fundamentals using a simplified multi-robot simulation environment. Built upon the standard ROS2 turtlebot tutorial, it's perfect for learning core concepts like:

• ROS2 nodes and topics
• Publishing and subscribing to messages
• Multi-robot simulation
• Basic command-line tools

For getting started commands and tutorials, see day1_command_cheat_sheet.md.

Session 2: Dynobot 🤖

Dynobot advances to a full physics simulation using the Gazebo simulator, featuring:

• Realistic robot model with LIDAR sensor
• Differential drive motion controller
• 3D physics simulation
• Advanced sensor integration
• Navigation and mapping capabilities

For setup and operation commands, see day2_command_cheat_sheet.md.

🎮 Interactive Features

Manual Control

When using a Logitech F710 controller, you can manually control the Dynobot by:

1. Ensuring the controller is connected before starting the container (sometimes rebuilding is necessary)
2. Setting the mode switch on the controller's back to D
3. Pressing LB and steering with the left joystick

🐳 Containerized Development

This course leverages Docker containers to provide a consistent, isolated development environment that eliminates dependency conflicts and ensures reproducible results across different systems.

---

Installation

We generally always recommend to install ROS2 and its dependencies inside a Docker container. This will simplify installation of a project and reduce problems with package dependencies, which is very common when installing ROS2 locally on a system considering the many distributions and releases.

Follow the links and installation steps below matching your OS.

Linux

• Docker
• VS Code
• VS Code Extensions: Remote Development

OPTIONAL (but speeds up simulation time, irrelevant for session 1)

• NVIDIA CUDA drivers + NVIDIA Container Toolkit

Windows

• WSL2
• Docker (Inside WSL2, same installation steps as for Linux)
• VS Code
• Connect VS Code to WSL
• VS Code Extensions: See Linux installation