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


After reading and running the code of this chapter, you will have learned to use many tools that will enable you to develop robotic systems faster, debug errors, and visualize your results so you can evaluate their quality or validate them. Some of the specific concepts and tools you will exploit the most in your life as a robotic developer are summarized as follows:

  • Now you know how to include logging messages in your code with different levels of verbosity, which will help you debug errors in your nodes. For this purpose, you could also use the powerful tools included in ROS, such as the rxconsole interface. Additionally, you can also inspect or list the nodes running, the topics published, and the services provided in the whole system while running. This includes the inspection of the node graph using rxgraph.

  • Regarding the visualization tools, you should be able to plot scalar data using rxplot for a more intuitive analysis of certain variables published by your nodes. Similarly...