Course feedback: 1) ros1 bridge was nice but added TOOO much operational headache, 2) Using OSS allows pariticpants to reuse the packages, but please do NOT remove commit history

[iisaac.saito]

Finished “ROS2 manipulation moveit” course. This was my 1st course on this platform. Course content itself is light-weight, doesn’t give deep insight into the subject but because of that it was easy to have some experience on. Response on the forum was timely enough. I’m glad to take this course, thanks!

I’m just sharing 2 major sources of my headache. I sent to feedback section but I want to share here as others might have something to share regarding these.

• ros1 bridge. It’s nice to have an experience of it, but I found too much operations involved, and seems very unstable/fragile/sensitive (unless I totally mis-operated, which I doubt I did). I suggest to remove ros1 bridge from manipulation tutorial. If that happens I’ll add 1 more star to my review.
  • I had to reboot parameter_bridge, action_bridge countless times as MoveIt lost connection to the robot that is running on ros1 side.
  • There are only 4 terminals available on web I/F, and even though I managed to pack some bridges into a single .launch.py file, I still needed to use 3 terminals just to run an application, so I only have 1 free terminal left for me. Then due to many runtime issues I had to do a lot of digging, for which a single terminal wasn’t sufficient in many cases.
• Please do not remove commit history from OSS packages.
  • Utilizing OSS libraries that are publicly available is nice (instead of in-house, blackbox code). This helps participants to replicate after leaving the tutorials.
  • However, please do NOT remove commit history. In this “ros2 manipulation”, an OSS pkg simple_grasping was customized on your end. But commit history didn’t clarify that (because I found simple_grasping useful in this tutorial, I wanted to use it for my own project, then it didn’t compile out of the box. Took me hours to find out that you guys made custom modification. I ended up making a pr simple_grasping!1).
    • For specific packages in this course, I removed the source of the entire perception_pcl, geometry_msgs, grasping_msgs and swapped with .deb version from apt, and I didn’t notice any issue (Nice addition is the compile time decreased to half). I also used simple_grasping from the PR I linked above.
  • Also related to this, bundling sources from multiple repositories into a fewer number of repos, please consider importing commit history, for the same reason as above.
• Bugs?
  • Unit5 A cpp files is shown as cartesian_planning.cpp then in the rest of the tutorial it’s cartesian_path.cpp w/o mentioned clearly. Due to this colcon build fails.

Thanks.

[bayodesegun]

Hi Isaac,

Thanks so much for this feedback. We’ll look into the points raised and use them to improve the course, as applicable.

[iisaac.saito]

I can’t seem to modify my own post but one more +1 about this course: 1) Pick-and-Place + 2) integrated with perception + 3) using OSS software. I’ve had hard time in finding a tutorial resource that fulfills those 3 things at once.

[bayodesegun]

This has been noted too, thanks.