Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández
Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández

Overview of this book

<p>Both the amateur and the professional roboticist who has ever tried their hand at robotics programming will have faced with the cumbersome task of starting from scratch, usually reinventing the wheel. ROS comes with a great number of already working functionalities, and this book takes you from the first steps to the most elaborate designs possible within this software framework.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" is full of practical examples that will help you to understand the framework from the very beginning. Build your own robot applications in a simulated environment and share your knowledge with the large community supporting ROS.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" starts with the basic concepts and usage of ROS in a very straightforward and practical manner. It is a painless introduction to the fascinating world of robotics, covering sensor integration, modeling, simulation, computer vision, and navigation algorithms, among other topics.</p> <p>After the first two chapters, concepts like topics, messages, and nodes will become daily bread. Make your robot see with HD cameras, or navigate avoiding obstacles with range sensors. Furthermore, thanks to the contributions of the vast ROS community, your robot will be able to navigate autonomously, and even recognize and interact with you, in a matter of minutes.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" will give you all the background you need to know in order to start in the fascinating world of robotics and program your own robot. Simply, you put the limit!</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter we have learned to install two different versions of ROS (Electric and Fuerte) in Ubuntu. With these steps, you have all the necessary software installed on your system to start working with ROS and the examples of this book. You can install ROS using the source code as well. This option is for advanced users, and we recommend that you use this repository only for installation; it is more common and normally it should not give errors or problems.

It is a good idea to play with ROS and the installation on a virtual machine. This way, if you have problems with the installation or with something, you can reinstall a new copy of your operating system and start again.

Normally, with virtual machines, you will not have access to real hardware, such as sensors and actuators. Anyway, you can use it for testing algorithms, for example.

In the next chapter, you will learn the architecture of ROS, some important concepts, and some tools to interact directly with ROS.