Introduction and Questions

[purple-cmyk]

Hello! My name is Shourya Sharma, a 3rd-year CS student at JUIT.

I’ve been exploring the RoboticsAcademy and PerceptionMetrics ecosystem, especially how exercises are built using the HAL layer and ROS2, and how PerceptionMetrics is expanding toward LiDAR and segmentation support.

While going through the ideas list and repositories, I had a few questions I couldn’t fully figure out just from the code and docs:

1. In RoboticsAcademy, some exercises use HAL while others directly use ROS2 topics for new exercises, is there a preferred approach to follow?

2. For the drone cat-mouse project with two robots, how are both agents usually coordinated  through separate ROS2 nodes communicating, or is there some internal handling in RoboticsBackend?

I’m particularly interested in contributing to deep learning based projects like PerceptionMetrics or the power tower inspection task, and also system-level improvements in RoboticsAcademy.
Looking to contribute.
This is great. Thanks

[jmplaza]

While going through the ideas list and repositories, I had a few questions I couldn’t fully figure out just from the code and docs:

1. In RoboticsAcademy, some exercises use HAL while others directly use ROS2 topics for new exercises, is there a preferred approach to follow?
2. For the drone cat-mouse project with two robots, how are both agents usually coordinated  through separate ROS2 nodes communicating, or is there some internal handling in RoboticsBackend?

Nice to meet you @purple-cmyk ,

1.- the HAL provides a simpleAPI to robot programming. We intend to support both approaches (simpleAPI and directROS topics), as you can see in the exercise status table. In the long run, each RoboticsAcademy exercise will be provided in four flavours: Python+simpleAPI, Python+directROS, C++ +simpleAPI, C++ +directROS, and let the RoboticsAcademy user to choose the one he/she prefers.

2.- that is something to be developed, hopefully along GSoC-2026. The general design is to have each robot application as a single process and do some magic in RoboticsBackend, typically in the RAM.

Cheers,