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 8. Programming Vision Sensors using ROS, Open-CV, and PCL

In the last chapter, we discussed interfacing of sensors and actuators using I/O board in ROS. In this chapter, we are going to discuss how to interface various vision sensors in ROS and program it using libraries such as OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) and PCL (Point Cloud Library). The vision in a robot is an important aspect of the robot for manipulating object and navigation. There are lots of 2D/3D vision sensors available in the market and most of the sensors have an interface driver package in ROS. We will discuss interfacing of new vision sensors to ROS and programming it using OpenCV and PCL.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Understanding ROS—OpenCV interfacing packages

  • Understanding ROS—PCL interfacing packages

  • Installing OpenCV and PCL interfaces in ROS

  • Interfacing USB webcams in ROS

  • Working with ROS camera calibration

  • Converting images between ROS and OpenCV using cv_bridge

  • Displaying images from...