Skip to content

Key Assessment Info & Requirements

Warning

Failure to follow all the requirements listed on this page could result in penalties being applied to your mark, or zero marks being awarded for a submission point and/or assignment task!

Your ROS package should be hosted on GitHub, it should be setup as a private repository, and you should have added tom-howard as a collaborator.

In addition to this, you should have registered your package with the teaching team (via the Google Form), so that we know where to find it on the submission deadlines.

All the above was covered in the Getting Started section, which you should have completed in the Week 1 Lab.

Having completed all of this successfully, we'll be able to pull your package on each of the submission dates so that your team's Assignment #2 work can be assessed. If you haven't completed all this, then you could receive zero marks!

Note

At some point within the first few weeks of the course a hello.md file will be pushed to your repo (by Tom) to confirm that it has been registered correctly.

Submission Points

As discussed here, there are two submission points for Assignment #2 and four tasks to complete overall:

Part Tasks Marks
(/100)		 Submission
A Tasks 1 & 2 40 Friday of Week 6 at 10pm (GMT)
B Tasks 3 & 4 60 Friday of Week 12 at 10pm (BST)

See the task pages for full details on each of the four tasks.

Dependencies

You may draw upon any pre-existing Python libraries or ROS 2 packages in your own work for Assignment #2 as long as they are pre-installed on the real robotics hardware (i.e. the Linux laptops in the lab). The WSL-ROS2 environment is equivalent to the software setup on the real robotics hardware, so any packages that exist in one will also exist in the other.

Note

You will not be able to request for any additional libraries/packages to be installed.

Key Requirements

In addition to registering your package correctly (as above), you must also ensure that the following Key Requirements are met for each of the submission points (A and B):

  • The name of your ROS package must be:

    com2009_teamXX_2025

    ... where XX should be replaced with your team number.

  • It must be possible to build your package by running the following command from the root of the local ROS2 Workspace, and this must build without errors:

    colcon build --packages-select com2009_teamXX_2025

  • You must ensure that a launch file exists for each of the programming tasks (Tasks 1, 2 & 3) and that these are callable (after having run the above colcon build command) so that we are able to launch your work using ros2 launch as follows1:

    ros2 launch com2009_teamXX_2025 taskY.launch.py

    ... where XX will be replaced by your team number, and Y will be replaced by the appropriate task number.

    Important

    You must have a launch file per task, and it must be named correctly (as explained in each of the task pages). We won't use any other method to launch your ROS nodes during the assessment.

  • Any nodes within your package that are executed by the above launch files must have been correctly defined as package executables (i.e. in your CMakeLists.txt) and must also have been assigned the appropriate execute permission (i.e. with chmod).

    Important

    It's up to you to ensure that your code launches as intended for a given task. If it doesn't, then you'll be awarded zero marks, so make sure you test it all out prior to submission!

  • Your package must contain no build files (build/, install/, logs/) that would be generated as a result of running colcon build from inside your package.

    Remember

    Always run colcon build from the root of the ROS workspace (e.g. ~/ros2_ws/), to ensure that all build files are generated in the right location in the filesystem (~/ros2_ws/build/, ~/ros2_ws/install/, ~/ros2_ws/logs/).

  • On each of the deadlines, we will pull your work from the main branch of your package repository. We will ONLY assess work on your main branch!

  • Your package's package.xml file must contain a <maintainer> tag for each member of your team. Add these as necessary, e.g.:

    <maintainer email="member.1@sheffield.ac.uk">Member 1's Name</maintainer>
<maintainer email="member.2@sheffield.ac.uk">Member 2's Name</maintainer>
...
    (providing each team member's Sheffield email address.)

For the assessment of each Assignment #2 Task, your package will be built and deployed on one of the Robotics Laptops that you'll have been working with extensively during the lab sessions. We will use the standard student user account, and your package will be downloaded to the ~/ros2_ws/src/ directory.

Other Important Information

  • The tuos_ros Course Repo will be installed and up-to-date on the Robotics Laptop that we use to assess your work with.

  • The Robotics Laptop that we use for the assessment will be selected at random.

  • This laptop will have been paired with a robot prior to us attempting to run your submission.

  • The robot will also be selected at random.

  • We will have already launched the bringup on the robot, so ROS will be up and running, and the robot will be ready to go in the arena.

  • A bridge between the robot and laptop will have already been established, and communications will be tested, prior to us attempting to launch your work for each task.

  1. Make sure you have defined an appropriate install directory in your package's CMakeLists.txt ↩