Week #1 17/02 - 21/02

First weeks of my new adventure

Posted by Rui Costa on February 21, 2020

This was my first week of work in my Masther's Degree Thesis. In the first few days, I've searched for some articles and papers to read, in order to get a better sense of the work that had been done related to my Thesis's theme.

In the remaing time of the week I prepared myself for the ROS course on Thursday and Friday. There were some pre-requisites to be done for this course, such as C++ and Phyton tutorials, so i dedicated some of my time for this purpose.

As my understandings of the ROS environment got better I started digging around the lartkv5. This is the toolkit made in LAR (Automation and Robotics Lab UA), and has some code that i'm supposed to use in the Thesis. I found many ROS packages that i will be using in the future, but due to the lack of documentation of these I'm still struggling to find the connection between some of them.

Between reading articles and doing ROS tutorials i began writting a few chapters of my preliminary report.

Thursday and Friday came and i had my ROS course. We started with a simple apresentation by Professor Miguel Oliveira about the ROS' way of communication, and began writting the first lines of code. During the course we used Phyton2, wich was exciting to learn. By Friday lunch we finnished the code and in the end we made a game using RViz, and all the content we've learned. In short, we created a tf object and ran around an arena chasing other players. It was a very fun project and i can try too implement some of my Thesis's theme principles to win :)