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 given an overview of the computer vision tools provided by ROS. We started by showing how to connect and run several types of cameras, particularly FireWire and the USB ones. The basic functionality to change their parameters is presented, so now you can adjust some parameters to obtain images of good quality. Additionally, we provided a complete USB camera driver example.

Then, we moved to the camera calibration topic. With this you have learned how easy it is to calibrate a camera. The importance of calibration is the ability to correct the distortion of wide angle cameras, particularly cheap ones. Also, the calibration matrix allows you to perform many computer vision tasks, such as visual odometry or perception.

We have shown how to work with stereo vision in ROS, and how to set up an easy solution with two inexpensive webcams. We have also explained the image pipeline and several APIs that work with computer vision in ROS, such as cv_bridge, ImageTransport...