The Western Norway University of Applied Sciences HVL located at the campus in Førde in Norway was interested in hosting the ROS Summer School. It was held in May 2019 for one week. The 7 participants had all different backgrounds: Ph.D. students, university teachers and engineers from industry who all have been invited by HVL. They learned the everything from the basics mechanisms in ROS up on how to program an autonomous driving robot. Also a short excursion to Mobile Manipulation was introduced.

The ROSIN partner FH Aachen exported the ROS Summer School to the  Western Norway University of Applied Sciences HVL. They have in total five different campuses with overall 16.000 students located around the west coast of Norway. The ROS-I School was given at the campus in Førde from May 20th to May 24th, 2019.

The HVL ROS Summer School covered the following topics regarding mobile and industrial robotics using ROS:

• Programming of Mobile Robots
• Communication
• Coordinate Transforms
• Teleoperation
• Landmark Detection
• Localization
• Mapping
• Navigation
• MoveIt!
• ROS with Industrial Robots

We used the Middleware ROS (Robot Operating System) as standard Operating System for Robots. After learning the theory all topics were experienced on real hardware using the differential Turtlebot3 robot, an UR5 industrial robot and additionally Gazebo simulation environments. In the end we had a competition where participants had to use their skills to program the robot to drive around a course autonomously without hitting obstacles using a planning approach.
The ROS Summer School is part of the rosin.eu research project.

Our Agenda for the HVL ROS Summer School:

• May 20th – Day 1: ROS Basics: Navigation in Linux, ROS Filesystem, develop executables for robots (ROS nodes)
• May 21st – Day 2: ROS Communication: Publisher/Subscriber principle, develop a program to teleoperate a robot
• May 22nd  – Day 3: Robot model description and image processing: ROS TF / Gazebo, describe robot kinematics and sensor locations, transform coordinate frames, camera calibration, identification and position estimation of Augmented Reality Tags
• May 23rd – Day 4: Robot environment perception and Navigation: Simultanous Localization and Mapping in a real environment, Path Planning
• May 24th – Day 5: Robot Challenge: Navigate your robot through a round course with collision avoidance

The ROS Summer School is designed to teach participants about how to get started with ROS; it is created for those who have an interest in autonomous systems, but don’t quite know how to get started. Some basic knowledge of Linux (Ubuntu) and one programming language such as Python or C++ are recommended.

Presenters of the HVL ROS Winter School were:

• Patrick Wiesen, M. Sc. (FB 8)
• Nicolas Limpert, M.Sc. (FB 5)
• MASCOR Institut of FH Aachen UAS

We were invited to present our ROS teaching program at HVL by Gizem Ates from HVL, who organized the HVL Summer School. She participated herself in a ROS Winter School edition in Innsbruck in 2018. Since that time, she has been enthusiastic about the ROS software and in touch with the ROS team in Aachen to plan a ROS Summer School at HVL to spread the open source spirit of the robot operating system there, too.