Basics - Terminal#

What you will need

What you will get

  • Know how to use a terminal

Working over the terminal is a skill that every roboticist-to-be needs to acquire. It enables you to work on remote agents or computers without the need for a graphical user interface (GUI) and lets you work very efficiently. Once you get the hang of it, you will find out for yourself how it can make your life easier.

Using a terminal#

It makes sense to learn how to use the terminal very well, as it will save you a lot of time along the way. If you are completely new to working with a terminal, often also called “console” or “command line”, an official beginners tutorial can be found on the Ubuntu website.

If you are looking for an extensive list of commands that can be used from the terminal, this is the place to look at.

Using the Duckietown Shell#

The Duckietown Shell, or dts for short, is a pure Python, easily distributable (few dependencies) utility for Duckietown.

The idea is that most of the functionalities are implemented as Docker containers, and dts provides a nice interface for that, so that users should not type a very long docker run command line. These functionalities range from calibrating your Duckiebot and running demos to building this Duckumentation and submitting agents to open challenges and monitoring your evaluations and leaderboard positioning.

If you followed all the steps in the laptop setup, you already installed dts. If not, now is the time to go back and do it.