Best Resources for learning Robotics and ROS2
ROS community on web is very active and helpful. While learning ROS, I found these resources to be extremely helpful. I wish someone had told me about these when I started out.
ROS.org website — Obviously, this is one of the first places with most detailed and abundant information, step-by-step guides, examples and links to other sites. Amazing amount of information for anyone to learn and solve any issues they may be running into during their project.
Bill from Dronebot Workshop is an Electronics GURU. He has such a cool demeanor and his soft spoken style is appreciated by many. His experience and knowledge of electronics is amazing. I find myself going back to his amazing blog articles and youtube channel all the time. The amount of details and quality of his blogs and Youtube videos and little touches he puts in anything he does — explaining the fundamental concepts, best practices, diagrams, video editing and sound production, he just hits it out of the park on every aspect of it. His series on building a real robot is especially awesome.
This site is another treasure of a resource. Lot of websites and videos show you the cool stuff about how to build a robot and other stuff. However, this site goes into painful details of things like configuring your Raspberry Pi hardware so you are able to use various interfaces like GPIO, I2C, serial ports etc. The list of very good articles covering every aspect of ROS2, Raspberry Pi and even Arduino integrations is very long and very well written. It would have taken me many months to learn the things that are so well documented on this website. So I really appreciate everything this site has on its series of blog articles. This is one of the most useful websites when it comes to ROS2 documentation and doing things hands on. I learned a lot about interfacing Arduinos with Raspeberry Pi from this site.
Hadabot site is a really cool resource that not only provides some great explanations on the ROS topics with the blog but this is one site where the Hadabot creator has put together the whole end to end package for you to build and run a ROS based robot. With a $100 kit that is thoughtfully put together to use the cheapest [not necessarily a bad thing] hardware components to recreate a robot that is as functional as Turtlebot to learn ROS. The integration with browser based Visual Studio Code and docker based software stack is so easy to setup and get it up and running and actually works at the end of the day. The kit comes with base chasis hardware, motors, motor controller, wheel encoders and ESP32 that acts as the brain of the robot. The ESP32 actually acts as a ROS publisher listening to joystick commands and sending motor controllers speed and direction signals. Kudos to the folks at Hadabot for such a great kit and putting so much thought and energy into creating a Total package at a very affordable cost for anyone to learn.
This guy is amazing, he has one of the most detailed tutorials on ros2 for navigation, integration with Gazebo simulations and Arduino based robots integrated with ROS. I just love the passion and the knowledge sharing he does with the wider community. If you want to learn by example and doing things hands on step by step and you are not afraid to follow very long tutorials at the end of which you have something really cool working, Automatic Addison is your resource.
This is another great site with so much information on building Robots from scratch with so many different types of materials and configurations. I derive a lot of inspiration from the projects documented here.
Other Great People on web doing ROS and Robotics:
Tiziano Fiorenzani — Amazing YouTube channel and github repository with so much information and inspiration. I found the technique of working with Raspberry Pi and Visual Studio using Samba share from one of his videos.
Ricardo Tellez — A phenomenal personality with a great company, a blog series and even a podcast. Ricardo is one of the most knowledgeable and respected guys on the web on topic of ROS Robotics. His podcast episodes on building a lean startup were very inspirational and informative.
Sid Faber — One of the first people I found and followed his blogs and videos on Youtube to learn about ROS, Ubuntu, Linux Containers and so on. He is very active on Canonical Blog and on your Youtube.
There are so many more wonderful people on the web from Robotics and ROS community that love to share the knowledge and inspiration with others and I’ll continue to add them here.
Best Resources for your builds, components and parts [besided Amazon]:
Sparkfun.com — Love this site for amount of detailed instructions and blogs along with the parts and components they offer.
Adafruit.com — One of the leaders in electronics, amazing site with detailed instructions, code libraries and blogs/videos along with the parts and components they offer.
PiHut — similar to sparkfun and adafruit. They are UK based but do ship to US.
Robotshop.com — They carry lots of robotics components including motor controllers and I have had great experience dealing with them.
Servocity.com — One of the most amazing hardware platforms Actobotics is available from this site. They also have tons of Youtube videos to walk you through step by step and these guys are big part of my builds. I have purchased kits and many parts from them, always very prompt and reliable in delivery of components. Their engineering team is second to none and I have learned a lot about mechanical structures working with Actobotics system.
GoBilda.com — Very similar to Servocity and equally good. Since I originally started with Servocity, I’m sticking with the Actobotics system but these guys have equally good system.
