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

Some tutorials to practice with ROS


It is time to practice what we have learned until now. In the upcoming sections, you will see examples to practice along with the creation of packages, using nodes, using the Parameter Server, and moving a simulated robot with TurtleSim.

Navigating through the ROS filesystem

We have some command-line tools to navigate through the filesystem. We are going to explain the most used ones.

To get information and move to packages and stacks, we will use rospack, rosstack, roscd, and rosls.

We use rospack and rosstack to get information about packages and stacks, the path, the dependencies, and so on.

For example, if you want to find the path of the turtlesim package, you will use this:

$ rospack find turtlesim

You will then obtain the following:

/opt/ros/fuerte/share/turtlesim

The same happens with stacks that you have installed in the system. An example of this is as follows:

$ rosstack find 'nameofstack'

To list the files inside the pack or stack, you will use...