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

Installing MoveIt!


Let's start with installing MoveIt!. The installation procedure is very simple and is just a single command.

Installing MoveIt! on ROS Indigo can be done using the following command. Here we are installing MoveIt! binary packages.

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-moveit-full

In ROS Jade, we can install MoveIt! using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-moveit-ros ros-jade-moveit-plugins ros-jade-moveit-planners

MoveIt! architecture

Let's start with MoveIt! and its architecture. Understanding the architecture of MoveIt! helps to program and interface the robot to MoveIt!. We will quickly go through the architecture and the important concepts of MoveIt!, and start interfacing and programming our robots.

Here is the MoveIt! architecture, included in their official web page at http://moveit.ros.org/documentation/concepts:

Figure 1: MoveIt! architecture diagram

The move_group node

We can say that move_group is the heart of MoveIt! as this node acts as an integrator...