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

Configuring TurtleBot and installing the 3D sensor software


There are minor but important environmental variables and software that are needed for the TurtleBot based on your selection of 3D sensors. We have attached a Kinect Xbox 360 sensor to our TurtleBot, but we will provide instructions to configure each of the 3D sensors mentioned in this chapter. These environmental variables are used by the ROS launch files to launch the correct camera drivers. In ROS Indigo, the Kinect and ASUS sensors are supported by different camera drivers, as described in the following sections.

Kinect

The environmental variables for the Kinect sensors are as follows:

export KINECT_DRIVER=freenect
export TURTLEBOT_3D_SENSOR=kinect

These variables should be added to the ~/.bashrc files of both the TurtleBot and the remote computer.

Kinect also requires a special driver for the camera to be downloaded from GitHub. Type the following commands in a terminal window on the TurtleBot netbook:

$ mkdir ~/kinectdriver
$ cd...