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

Chapter 9. Combining Everything – Learn by Doing

We will finish this book by showing how to work with real robots, which are regularly used by research groups and robotic companies worldwide. Several of these groups and companies have already ported the software of their robots to the ROS framework, and they have made the ROS packages for their robots publicly available. As we will see in the following sections, these packages usually comprise several stacks, covering the navigation, the robot-specific drivers, teleoperation, and the robot URDF model for the simulation in Gazebo.

Here we will show you how to install the packages for the most known robots, and work with them in simulation. Note that most of these robots are very expensive, but you can develop for them and contribute your algorithms to the manufacturers. Anyway, in some cases the robots are affordable by the amateur user, like in the case of the turtlebot based on the roomba. Nevertheless, you will be able to run and work with...