Hi All,

We ran an introductory ROS workshop at Robots and Dinosaurs in Sydney last Saturday. It was loads of fun and got a lot of new people started with ROS.

We share the workshop with movie model makers (such as Dalek and R2D2), and there's been a bit of interest in automating some of those.

I also put a few resources up which others might find useful for workshops:

https://sites.google.com/site/mechatronicsguy/ros-workshop

Including:

Per-machine setup for workstations
Rough slides for ROS introduction
Example set of exercises for the group to work on.*
Cheatsheets to aid with new Linux users

And there was so much local interest that we've formed a Sydney ROS users group:

https://groups.google.com/group/sydney_ros

If anyone's in the Sydney area and would like to come along, you're most welcome. We'll be meeting up in Robots and Dinosaurs on Saturday the 27th April at noon.

Regards,

Gavin Smith

*One technique that worked quite well with this was shameless bribery. I put up some topics or TF frames on the network, and the first group to find it or describe the relationship correctly got chocolates. Exactly the right amount of mad scrabbling and fun, without it being too competitive. :-)