Hi, it’s-a me, Mario!

A Robotics enthusiast with a MSc degree in Engineering Physics, currently diving into a Ph.D.

  • 9 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • My goal is to figure out a system where I can declare the shape of a robot like this (armature size, number of joints, offsets etc) to create a virtual model of the robot.

    This sounds like URDF.

    Now, I’m sure there are systems and packages that do all the math for this already, so what tools/libraries do you guys use to do modeling like this?

    It is normal to use ROS to send instructions and receive feedback from robots, you can also setup a simulated environment with ROS and Gazebo.

    ROS can be a bit rough to get into, if you need any help, you can post on the ROS community.






  • Yeah, although I don’t like this approach. Using containers seems to be the best choice here. In this way you can keep the default/custom Steam bindings, which is very useful. And you don’t have the audio, sleep, OS or battery problems they talk in the video. I would argue that “desktop use” is not the best use for a Steam Deck, but more as a field computer.


  • Yes, I believe it has plenty advantages in using the steam deck vs android tablets. Instead of installing Ubuntu on my Steam Deck, I utilize Podman and Podman Compose to launch the necessary ROS nodes.

    My Steam Deck records compressed RGB+D and LiDAR data into rosbags, while running a LOAM-based algorithm and visualizing the map in real-time. During this process, the CPU usage remains around 70%. The primary consumer of system resources was Chrome, (running Foxglove), which accounted for approximately 17% of CPU usage. This leaves room to experiment with more resource-intensive algorithms (which I will be doing in the future). I think I could not have managed this in a tablet for the price of the Steam Deck.

    The presence of joysticks on the Steam Deck proves useful for utilizing it as a controller, another benefit versus using an Android tablet. Although I have not yet messed with the joysticks, only with the back buttons to add a few keybindings.