Intro to ROS 2

09:00 - 10:30 / 11:00 - 12:00 – Jose Miguel Guerrero, Francisco Martin Rico

Lecture description: This course introduces students to the fundamentals of ROS 2, including its architecture and core communication concepts. Through hands-on activities, students will develop a ROS 2-based perception-decision-action loop that enables robots to detect obstacles and respond autonomously. The course emphasizes practical experience in building autonomous robotic behaviors using modern, modular software tools.

Session materials:

Preparation

Please, carefully follow the steps outlined in the repository ahead of the practical session to ensure everything runs smoothly and we make the most of the available time:

Bio. José Miguel Guerrero Hernández earned his Bachelor’s Degree, Master’s Degree, and Doctorate in Computer Science from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in 2008, 2010, and 2015, respectively. He was a predoctoral fellow of the training research program at UCM (2011-2013) and a subprogram university lecturer (FPU) at the MECD (2013-2015). Following this, he served as a postdoctoral research assistant at UCM (2015-2017), UNED (2017-2018), and CIEMAT (2018-2019), before becoming a Professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (2019-present). He graduated with honors and has been the recipient of multiple grants and awards.

He has participated as a researcher in 5 European Projects (1 as Co-IP), 9 projects of the National Plan, 1 project of the Comunidad de Madrid, and 3 Art.-83 projects, collaborating with multinational and national companies, research centers, and universities. During his predoctoral stay at the Intelligent Systems and Robotics group at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), he applied vision-based machine learning approaches for perceptual tasks on an autonomous car to detect curbs and road limits in real-time.

He has 41 publications with over 1600 citations and an h-index of 14. He has participated in 5 international committees and representations, served as a Guest Editor in Frontiers, and has been a recognized reviewer in international JCR-indexed journals since 2013.

His research focuses on the development of new multisensory fusion techniques for Perception Systems applied to Precision Agriculture, Marine Navigation, Social Robots, Autonomous Robot Localization and Navigation in indoor and outdoor environments, and the development of real-time applications in C++ and ROS. Currently, he works as an Associate Professor (Profesor Titular de Universidad) in the Signal Theory, Communications, Telematics Systems, and Computation Department at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC). He has been recognized with 2 six-year research periods (sexenios) and 2 teaching periods (1 quinquenio, 1 DOCENTIA). He is the mobility coordinator for the Bachelor’s Degree in Robotics Software Engineering, a member of the Intelligent Robotics Lab group, and an active member of the ROS/ROS 2 community. He has contributed to the development of new didactic tools, including a book chapter, a radio program, and participation in 7 Educational Innovation projects. Furthermore, he has taught various courses at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, supervised 11 Final Degree Projects (URJC) and 8 Final Master’s Dissertations at different universities (UCM, UNED, UNIR), and has been part of evaluation committees for 26 Final Degree Projects and 85 Master’s Dissertations.

Bio. Francisco Martin Rico is Full Professor at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain), where he leads the Intelligent Robotics Lab. His research and teaching focus on software architectures for robots, planning, cognitive systems, mobile robot navigation, and ROS 2 technologies.

He is the author of the book A Concise Introduction to Robot Programming with ROS 2 and is widely recognized for his contributions to the ROS 2 ecosystem. Francisco is the main author of PlanSys2, the reference symbolic planning framework for ROS 2, and has contributed to several core ROS 2 packages, including rclcpp, Behavior Trees, and Nav2. He has also served as a member of the ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee and is currently President of the ROS España Association.

Francisco is actively involved in multiple European and national research projects, and his group is internationally recognized for its work in ROS 2, robot navigation, and automated planning. In recognition of his impact on the ROS community, he received the ROS Developer of the Year Award at ROS Developer Day 2022.