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Week 2: Systems and Perception
Week 2 -
Systems and Perception
ROS 2, robot descriptions, motion planning, navigation, SLAM, and perception.
ROS 2 Jazzy: install, nodes, topics, services
Glossary primer (12 min) ROS 2 — Open source middleware framework for robotics. Successor to ROS 1, built on DDS (Data Distribution Service)...
URDF, Xacro, and the robot description model
Glossary primer (10 min) URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) — XML schema describing a robot's links, joints, visual meshes, collision m...
MoveIt 2: motion planning for the Panda
Glossary primer (10 min) MoveIt 2 — ROS 2 motion planning framework. Industry standard. Ships planners, IK solvers, collision checking, time...
Nav2: navigation stack for a TurtleBot4
Glossary primer (12 min) Nav2 — ROS 2 navigation framework. Successor to move base . Behavior tree based. Costmap — 2D grid of traversabilit...
SLAM: building a map from scratch with slam_toolbox
Glossary primer (10 min) SLAM — Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Build a map of an unknown environment while tracking your pose in it....
Modern perception: DINOv3, SAM 3, Depth-Anything V2
Glossary primer (12 min) Vision foundation model (VFM) — A large pre trained vision model whose features generalize to many downstream tasks...
FoundationPose + Week 2 integration + fresh-clone
Glossary primer (10 min) 6 DoF pose estimation — Find an object's full SE(3) pose (position + orientation) from sensors. Standard input to g...
What you will know by end of Week 2
- Read the week's source papers without drowning in undefined terms.
- Run the week's core software stack from a fresh clone.
- Explain the week's systems in terms of data, control, and learning loops.