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, you worked on the steps required to configure your robot in order to use it with the navigation stack. Now you know that the robot must have a planar laser, must be a differential wheeled robot, and it should satisfy some requirements for the base control and the geometry.

Keep in mind that we are working with Gazebo to demonstrate the examples and explain how the navigation stack works with different configurations. It is more complex to explain all of this directly on a real, robotic platform because we do not know whether you have one or have access to one. In any case, depending on the platform, the instructions may vary and the hardware may fail, so it is safer and useful to run these algorithms in simulations; later, we can test them on a real robot, as long as it satisfies the requirements described thus far.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to configure the navigation stack, create the .launch files, and navigate autonomously in Gazebo with the robot...