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

Chapter 4. Using the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation Stack

In the previous chapters, we have been discussing about the designing and simulation of a robotic arm and mobile robot. We controlled each joint of the robotic arm in Gazebo using the ROS controller and moved the mobile robot inside Gazebo using the teleop node.

In this chapter, we are going to interface out of the box functionalities, such as robot manipulation and autonomous navigation using the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation stack.

MoveIt! is a set of packages and tools for doing mobile manipulation in ROS. The official web page (http://moveit.ros.org/) contains the documentations, the list of robots using MoveIt!, and various examples to demonstrate pick and place, grasping, simple motion planning using inverse kinematics, and so on.

MoveIt! contains state of the art software for motion planning, manipulation, 3D perception, kinematics, collision checking, control, and navigation. Apart from the command line interface, MoveIt! has some...