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

Creating the robot description for a seven DOF robot manipulator


Now, we can create some complex robots using URDF and xacro. The first robot we are going to deal with is a seven DOF robotic arm, which is a serial link manipulator having multiple serial links. The seven DOF arm is kinematically redundant, which means it has more joints and DOF than required to achieve its goal position and orientation. The advantage of redundant manipulators are, we can have more joint configuration for a particular goal position and orientation. It will improve the flexibility and versatility of the robot movement and can implement effective collision free motion in a robotic workspace.

Let's start creating the seven DOF arm; the final output model of the robot arm is shown here (the various joints and links in the robot are also marked on the image):

Figure 8 : Joints and Links of seven dof arm robot

The preceding robot is described using xacro. We can take the actual description file from the cloned repository...