ENME480 · Support

Help

Piazza first for anything the whole class might hit. Email only for things specific to you.

Who to ask

Channel	Contact	Use it for
Piazza	piazza.com/umd/fall2026/enme480	Course and lab questions, extension requests, announcements
Instructor	Dr. Nikhil Chopra · nchopra@umd.edu	Course content, grades, personal circumstances
Office hours	Thu 10:00–11:30 am on Zoom	Anything above, in person
Teaching assistants	Alex Beyer abeyer@umd.edu · Kaustubh Joshi kjoshi@umd.edu	Labs, setup, debugging
Canvas / ELMS	elms.umd.edu	Materials, submissions, grades
GitHub	github.com/ENME480	Lab code and updates

TA office hours are TBD and will be posted on Piazza. Email is likely to get buried, and ELMS messages are not monitored closely, so Piazza really is the fastest route.

Safety

Robot lab

Safety training is a prerequisite for entry. Never bypass an interlock or remove a guard. Stay outside the arm's reach while it is powered. If you are unsure what the robot is about to do, hit the emergency stop first and ask afterwards.

Running AI-generated code on a physical system is unsafe for you, your classmates, the TAs and the robots. Anyone caught doing it risks losing robot access for the rest of the semester.

For a medical or fire emergency call 911 or the University Police, then follow the posted evacuation procedure. Report equipment damage to a TA immediately and log it on Piazza so the next group knows.

Lab expectations

• Before: finish the pre-lab reading and have your environment working. Studio time is for debugging your code, not your install.
• During: ask early. A TA can unblock in two minutes what will otherwise cost you the session.
• Attendance: studios are mandatory. If you have a conflict, post on Piazza in advance and coordinate with your group.
• Homework: posted Fridays at 11:59 pm, due one week later on Canvas. Extensions go through Piazza and are given sparingly, since solutions are released soon after the deadline.

First-line troubleshooting

Try these before posting. Most lab problems are one of them.

# Which Ubuntu am I actually on?
lsb_release -a

# ROS 2 environment sourced?
printenv | grep ROS_DISTRO      # expect: humble
source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash

# Workspace overlay sourced? (needed again after every build)
source ~/ros2_ws/install/setup.bash

# Is the node running and publishing?
ros2 node list
ros2 topic list
ros2 topic hz /joint_states

# Out of disk? A full partition breaks colcon in confusing ways.
df -h

Posting a question that gets answered fast

Search Piazza first, then include four things: what you ran, what you expected, the full error text, and what you already tried.

ros2 run enme480_labs fk_node exits with ImportError: cannot import name 'kinematic_functions'. I re-sourced install/setup.bash, confirmed the file is listed in setup.py under packages, and rebuilt with --symlink-install. Full traceback: ...

A screenshot of a terminal is harder to help with than pasted text. Paste the text.