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 5. Working with Pluginlib, Nodelets, and Gazebo Plugins

In the previous chapter, we have discussed about the interfacing and simulation of the robotic arm mobile robot to the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation stack. In this chapter, we will see some of the advanced concepts in ROS such as the ROS pluginlib, nodelets, and Gazebo plugins. We will discuss the functionalities and applications of each concept and will look at an example to demonstrate it's working. We have used Gazebo plugins in the previous chapters to get the sensor and robot behavior inside the Gazebo simulator. In this chapter, we are going to see how to create it. We will also discuss an modified form of ROS nodes called ROS nodelets. These features in ROS are implemented using a plugin architecture called pluginlib.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Understanding pluginlib

  • Implementing a sample plugin using pluginlib

  • Understanding ROS nodelets

  • Implementing a sample nodelet

  • Understanding and creating a Gazebo...