ME450 Embedded Systems in Robotics Schedule

Welcome to the lecture notes for ME450: Embedded Systems in Robotics, a core course for Northwestern University's Master of Science in Robotics Program!

This page has the schedule for a 10 week course. The notes are also organized by topic.

• Guidelines
• Homework 1 (Issued 09/24/2026. Due 10/07/2026, 11:59 pm.)
• Homework 2 (Issued 10/08/2026. Due 10/22/2026, 11:59 pm.)

• Colcon
• Launchfiles (XML Only)
• Synchronous Service Calls
• Spinning and Asynchronicity, focused primarily on:
  • Service Clients
  • blocking_calls

• Spinning and Asynchronicity
• Demo Interface Package
• https://github.com/m-elwin/async_experiments

The demo will be from 12pm - 2pm

• As of 9/2026, the API documentation, hosted at https://docs.ros.org/en/lyrical/p/<package> are broken.
  • https://github.com/ros2/ros2_documentation/issues/7185
  • https://github.com/ros2/ros2/issues/1877
• As a workaround, I recommend building the documentation locally using rosdoc2
  • Links in the notes may point to the rolling version until this bug is fixed, but the online API documentation is often incomplete.
  • The version of rosdoc2 that ships with ROS 2 is also broken, so these instructions contain a workaround for that as well.

• Below is an example for rclpy.

  mkdir -p ~/ws/ros_docs
  cd ~/ws/ros_docs
  git clone https://github.com/ros/rclpy -b lyrical
  python3 -m rosdoc2.main build --package-path rclpy/rclpy
  

• Documentation is available in ~/ws/ros_docs/docs_output/rclpy/index.html
• Change the repository you clone to the source code of the package you wish to build documentation for
• Change the --package-path argument to rosdoc2 to the directory containing the package.xml for the package you wish to document