Book Image

Robot Operating System Cookbook

By : Kumar Bipin
Book Image

Robot Operating System Cookbook

By: Kumar Bipin

Overview of this book

This book will leverage the power of ROS with an introduction to its core and advanced concepts through exciting recipes. You will get acquainted with the use of different synchronous and asynchronous communication methods, including messages, services, and actions. You will learn how to use the various debugging and visualization tools used in development and how to interface sensors and actuators with the ROS framework. Firstly, you will get to grips with ROS simulation frameworks, such as Gazebo and RotorS for modeling and simulating any physical robot and virtual environment. You will also cover mobile robotics, micro-aerial vehicles, and robotic arms, which are the leading branches of robotic applications. Robot Operating System Cookbook will also guide you in the development of an autonomous navigation framework for both mobile robots and micro-aerial vehicles. Finally, you will explore ROS-Industrial, an open source project that extends the advanced capabilities of ROS software to manufacturing industries.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Developing a custom MoveIt! IKFast plugin

In the preceding section, we have learned how to configure the MoveIt! packages with a particular robotic arm to perform motion planning. The MoveIt! package use the default KDL kinematics plugin, which finds IK solutions using a numerical method.

This default numerical IK solver, KDL, is mainly used so that robots have a degree of freedom (DOF > 6), whereas most of the industrial robotic arms have DOF <= 6. Therefore, we can use analytic solvers, which are much faster than numerical solvers.

Getting ready

In this section, we will discuss how to generate an IK solver plugin using IKFast, a powerful inverse kinematics solver provided by the OpenRAVE (http://openrave.org/) motion...