Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example

Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example

Overview of this book

The visionaries who created ROS developed a framework for robotics centered on the commonality of robotic systems and exploited this commonality in ROS to expedite the development of future robotic systems. From the fundamental concepts to advanced practical experience, this book will provide you with an incremental knowledge of the ROS framework, the backbone of the robotics evolution. ROS standardizes many layers of robotics functionality from low-level device drivers to process control to message passing to software package management. This book provides step-by-step examples of mobile, armed, and flying robots, describing the ROS implementation as the basic model for other robots of these types. By controlling these robots, whether in simulation or in reality, you will use ROS to drive, move, and fly robots using ROS control.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ROS Robotics By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Building a differential drive robot URDF


URDF is an XML format specifically defined to represent robot models down to their component level. These URDF files can become long and cumbersome on complex robot systems. Xacro (XML Macros) is an XML macro language created to make these robot description files easier to read and maintain. Xacro helps you reduce the duplication of information within the file.

For our first robot model, we will build a URDF file for a two-wheeled differential drive robot. The model will be created incrementally, and we will view the results at each step in rviz. When our simple two-wheeled robot is complete, we will add Gazebo formatting and view the model in Gazebo. In Chapter 5, Creating Your First Robot Arm (in Simulation), we will expand our knowledge of URDF files and build a simple robot arm model using the Xacro notation.

Note

Downloading the ros_robotics code

You can download the example code files and other support material for this book from www.PacktPub.com...