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

Summary


In this chapter, we mainly discussed the importance of robot modeling and how we can model a robot in ROS. We discussed more on the robot_model meta package and the packages inside robot_model such as urdf, xacro, joint_state_publisher, and so on. We discussed URDF, xacro, and the main URDF tags that we are going to use. We also created a sample model in URDF and xacro and discussed the difference between the two. After that, we created a complex robotic manipulator with seven DOF and saw the usage of the joint state publisher and robot state publisher packages. At the end of the chapter, we saw the designing procedure of a differential drive mobile robot using xacro. In the next chapter, we will look at the simulation of these robot using Gazebo.