Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

The area of robotics is gaining huge momentum among corporate people, researchers, hobbyists, and students. The major challenge in robotics is its controlling software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book discusses the advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. It starts with deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. After discussing robot manipulation and navigation in robots, you will get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. One of the essential ingredients of robots are vision sensors, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor, its interfacing in ROS, and its programming. You will discuss the hardware interfacing and simulation of complex robot to ROS and ROS Industrial (Package used for interfacing industrial robots). Finally, you will get to know the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Collision checking in robot arm using MoveIt!


Along with motion planning and IK solving algorithm, one of the important tasks that is done in parallel in MoveIt! is collision checking and its avoidance. The collision can be self collision or environmental collision. MoveIt! can handle both the environment collision and the self collision. The MoveIt! package is inbuilt with FCL (Flexible Collision Library) (http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/FCL/fcl_docs/webpage/generated/index.html), which is an open source project that implements various collision detection and avoidance algorithms. MoveIt! takes the power of FCL and handles collision inside planning scene using a collision_detection::CollisionWorld class. The MoveIt! collision checking includes objects such as meshes, primitives shapes such as boxes and cylinders, and OctoMap. The OctoMap (http://octomap.github.io/) library implements a 3D occupancy grid called octree that consists of probabilistic information of obstacles in the environment. The...