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Glad you found it useful!

Glad you enjoyed it!

You're welcome!

Glad you enjoyed it! That's a great question - I've touched on those areas but I don't have an in-depth understanding. I'd say get a lot of experience with ML, as many models as you can build. I've heard it said that ML is just as much an art form as it is science. A great grasp of statistics is a must. I'd also say that I'd prefer a conventional algorithm to an ML one so that it's repeatable, but at least I would hope that ML could interface with conventional algorithms, so you could research how to include normal code with your ML algorithm - maybe multiple models with code layers in between. Good luck in an exciting career path!

That's great to hear! I've also struggled with the setup, including for this video, so hearing you've been able to get up and running because of it is excellent.

I'm glad it was helpful!

This is a great goal!

Glad you liked it!

Hope it helped!!

gg!

That's a great point! It ties in well with admitting your mistakes and improving from them. Pinning this so future viewers can benefit from your advice.

That's great! Sounds like you have a solid grounding for building robotics. Maybe it's time to build a robot for yourself!

I'm glad it was helpful! Let me know if there's anything else you want to see from the Spot.

That's very odd. If you put the robot on a podium so its wheels can free-spin, do both wheels move in the forward direction? I would suspect that one motor isn't working if not for your backwards working properly.

@@mikelikesrobots strangely i test run the jetbot notebook it works smootly both forward and backward motion. i did tested on podium . as well , the next thing i tried publishing simple TwistStamped linear x = 0.5 and strangely the motor was moving faster than. i was suspecting it could be something related to controller designed maybe

nevermind , i am able to see now

I'm glad you solved your issue!

That's a very confusing error message.. It sounds like something in the qwiic Python library isn't working correctly. I would suggest trying a few different versions of it to see if it works any better. Are you running this on a JetBot?

@@mikelikesrobots Hi Mike, thanks for the reply! Yes I am running it on the exact same waveshare jetbot as you do! Maybe can you please provide the exact qwiic library version that is working on your side? So can easily discover if it's the version issue

I've just checked, and unfortunately I've wiped it since to work on the ros2_control video! You're welcome to go to that one instead of you need some working code - it compiles C++ code to do it instead of using Python, so there's no dependencies on libraries. I hope that or changing the qwiic version helps!

@@mikelikesrobots thanks so much! I will try!

Hi! My best way to explain how to do this is in the video. The laptop that I use to run the SDK is doing the job of the companion computer. It uses WiFi to communicate and password authentication to connect. These procedures are all described in the Spot documentation: dev.bostondynamics.com/docs/concepts/networking

@@mikelikesrobots I see, thank you very much for your response!

That is certainly possible, and leveraging the cloud for that makes it possible to use a much more complex ML model. However, your robot's behaviour then relies on a cloud connection. I would recommend that the robot is able to operate independently in case the cloud connection isn't available. That could be by using a nearby server (see my Greengrass videos), or by keeping a basic model on board for those times that the robot can't reach the complex model in the cloud.

Congrats on starting your degree! It sounds like you're more interested in the low-level side of robotics if you're studying electronics and communication. I would look into getting an arduino or similar and learning how to use serial communication, including UART, I2C, and SPI. Then look at building a board that you can control with an arduino, preferably including motors. This is very specific because the skills I would recommend are already in the video, such as focusing on software development. Let me know if you wanted a more general answer.

yes.

In short: yes, but it's more difficult. The longer answer: companies look for a university degree, and you're likely to have a harder time getting the job without one. Even a related degree is enough for employers (mine is in Electrical & Electronic Engineering). The major difficulty is getting that first job in the industry without a degree - once you're in the job, you will learn a huge amount very quickly. Yes, you can become a very competent self-taught robotics software engineer without going to university, but it will require persistence and a good grounding in robotics to take that first step. Once you have the practical experience on your resume, it will get easier.

@@mikelikesrobots Thanks for your reply. i'm actually an agriculture engineer and fulstack web developper. i run my own small business and have lots of time. based on my previous experience in Agriculture, i see lots of needs for robotics in that industry. i have very specific ideas of robotics that could work; so i want to prepare for about two years learning robotics to start an agritech robotic startup to address the needs i see in agriculture. Could you suggest me a learning roadmap that i can follow for the next 2 years ?

That's very ambitious! I will give you a warning: robotics tooling is nowhere near as mature as web development tooling. Developing robots is a very slow and expensive process that requires a lot of people - one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing is to try to make it faster, cheaper, and easier. As to your question - learn ROS, gRPC, enough cloud tooling (mostly IoT); then start building small robotics projects and build up in complexity. Lean on the community and try to build up a team. All robotics projects that go into production need a full team - robotics is simply too complex right now to do alone.

I do remember you! Feel free to comment anytime. As for your question, I don't think it is possible. The lidar is essentially checking in a circle around itself how far its laser can reach, so you would only have a flat plane to tell what an object is. Imagine sweeping a laser across the side of a cup - you would see a curved surface, but wouldn't be able to tell what the rest of the object is above and below that laser line. Are you able to combine the data with other sensors, like an RGB camera?

Appreciate the feedback! I'm working on making the audio less echo-y in general - the troubles of producing your own videos. I'm glad the video was good quality, thank you!

Glad you found it useful!

I'm glad you find them useful! For learning general software development, I link to some resources in my video on Getting Started as a Robotics Software Engineer: th-cam.com/video/tkYZmw8x-SM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=zdsO_HxhlOJDP5FT As for AWS specifically, I don't talk about that much. I hope the videos on this channel prove useful, but you can also take a look at AWS documentation and try to work through some of their workshops. There are also plenty of videos on the official channel: www.youtube.com/@amazonwebservices/playlists - and you could consider studying for a Cloud Practitioner certification: aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/ I think resources for the Cloud Practitioner may be paid, but you can see what's available online. Unfortunately, I don't have a recommendation for this - I studied as a Developer Associate using Cloud Guru, which is a paid service. It was very good, though!

You are welcome! I would recommend a robotics course if you can get one, or if not, your favourite area of robotics to pursue more deeply. For example, machine learning is heavily used for computer vision. You could also go straight into the industry, which is what I did!

Glad you enjoyed it!

You'll need a xacro/urdf file for ROS to understand how the robot joints etc relate to each other. As to HOW to make that file, that's a lot of info to give in a comment! I don't have a video on building URDF from scratch, so you may need to look on other channels, such as Articulated Robotics.

@@mikelikesrobots i know its alot , but i have phind , its like chat gpt but better it helps with most programming questions

@@mikelikesrobots thank you i will check articulated robotics

It's great you're picking up Python! You'll be able to write most robotics code in Python - it's only when you get to writing motor controllers or something very low level that you'll need C++. I'd recommend sticking to Python for now, and when you're feeling more confident, try learning C++ as well. If you want to see more JetBot info, I have a playlist here: th-cam.com/play/PLBrq1OKRHMwXE9nNaaN7SMofoYJcqAqCj.html&si=FIcVDEnObPXxskeI

I've just blurred it out of the video - appreciate you mentioning this, thank you!

I had no idea! Thank you for pointing it out - hopefully I can get hold of the latest dev kit and do an update video.

@@mikelikesrobots great. Orin dev kit is a bit more pricier. I'm not sure if it's beneficial compared to TurtleBot3 Burger. May be you can do a comparison video on that 😉

You're right! A Turtlebot setup video and a comparison video would be great. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.

I'm happy you learned so many things! I also appreciate your feedback on the screen size - going forwards, I'll try to make sure that code is visible even on mobile screens. Thank you for speaking up!

Thank you! I iterate quickly by making small scripts for building and running a Greengrass component locally. Every time I make a change, I can quickly get it running via Greengrass. Some aliases for checking logs can help too. I'm not aware of any hot-reload or docker volumes that can help, but that's a good idea I might have to look into! More info on testing available in AWS docs: docs.aws.amazon.com/greengrass/v2/developerguide/test-components.html

@@mikelikesrobots Thanks for the reply! I found a helpful resource (th-cam.com/video/adx3zUGRoWw/w-d-xo.html) that provides a guide for running the component locally without needing to deploy. This is a faster development loop than the deploy and remove workflow. Is this aligned with your approach?

Yes! I work with Michael, he's extremely helpful and knowledgeable. In fact, if you check the description of this video, you'll see that I've already linked it. I prefer the scripting approach to restarting via script rather than console, but I think the console has its uses too.

That's a cool looking bot! How well does it keep its feet compared to Spot?

​@@mikelikesrobots Ghost robotics robots are overpriced junk compared to Boston Dynamics. Plus they are stealing BD's patents. Big thumbs down for that. I've been pretty impressed with Unitree robots. I can recommend the Go series, I really like them. Spot still is and will still be probably the best out of the best, but surely Unitree is real good too.

That's the plan! I'd love to do more with ROS, like showing how the nav stack works.

I always authorize my SSH key on my EC2 instances so I can SSH and SCP onto it! Instructions for SSHing are available in docs: docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/connect-linux-inst-ssh.html But, you don't need to generate a keypair every time. Generate a keypair on your own machine, then when launching EC2 specify not to provide a keypair. When it's up, you can use EC2 Connect and add your public key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file, which will let you SSH in to the instance. If you're struggling, let me know where and I can add more info.

I've had the issue with my OLED turning off too. You might find reflashing the SD helps, but I did find out that I could SSH to the robot even with the OLED off, as long as I knew the IP address. My advice is to note down the IP address when the robot starts up and connect using that; if it never shows an IP address, try reflashing the SD card. Good luck!

Thank you!

Thank you! Hopefully it's useful to you!

I'm struggling to think of what it could be, honestly. As you can see from the video, it just worked for me. Are you operating from a login that has Administrator privileges? Maybe you have permission to create rules, but not to update IAM policies for them? The only alternative I can think of is to try to create it via CDK and see if you have the same issue. Let me know if you solve it - I'm confused on this!

@@mikelikesrobots Thanks for the answer. I do have admin privileges and also solved the issue by adding the policies I need manually by writing the JSON code myself. I was just curious since the way you did it is way more convenient

I'm glad it worked for you - but the apt upgrade corruption should not have happened. Maybe it's an issue with your SD card? An apt upgrade should never corrupt your system, and running through this setup multiple times on my setup never had the problem. Sorry I can't help you any further! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Glad you enjoyed it! If another error other than a timeout occurs, the state machine would believe that the drink never got made, but wouldn't handle it by setting the robot to broken. Instead, the state machine would immediately fail. The robot would have its status left to WORKING and still wouldn't get used by in future executions. Really, you would want to change the error handling based on error type, which is why it only watches for timeouts - for example, if the error came from failing to send the MQTT message in the first place, then you need to shut down all the robots and figure out why the permissions are broken.

You're welcome! I encourage you to buy something and experiment for yourself - have fun with it. If you have experience with electrical control systems, arduino, and microcontrollers, you might be well equipped to build your own robot from scratch with that STM NUCLEO board I show in the video. Good luck!

I'm glad it helped!

Honestly, I'm stumped. I've run through the setup multiple times from scratch for different videos and the last time I saw that error was when I developed the initial Dockerfile - so it shouldn't be an issue now at all. That means I have to guess the next step. I would try two options: 1, install the driver from source: github.com/sparkfun/Qwiic_Py Or 2, edit the motor.py file. Make it so it assumes that the AdaFruit motor class is the one to use and remove the qwiic import. Good luck!