Book Image

Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition

By : Anil Mahtani, Luis Sánchez, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo
Book Image

Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition

By: Anil Mahtani, Luis Sánchez, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo

Overview of this book

Building and programming a robot can be cumbersome and time-consuming, but not when you have the right collection of tools, libraries, and more importantly expert collaboration. ROS enables collaborative software development and offers an unmatched simulated environment that simplifies the entire robot building process. This book is packed with hands-on examples that will help you program your robot and give you complete solutions using open source ROS libraries and tools. It also shows you how to use virtual machines and Docker containers to simplify the installation of Ubuntu and the ROS framework, so you can start working in an isolated and control environment without changing your regular computer setup. It starts with the installation and basic concepts, then continues with more complex modules available in ROS such as sensors and actuators integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, Computer Vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to leverage all the ROS Kinetic features to build a fully fledged robot for all your needs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Effective Robotics Programming with ROS Third Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. ROS Architecture and Concepts

Once you have installed ROS, you're probably be thinking, OK, I have installed it, so now what? In this chapter, you will learn the structure of ROS and the parts it is made up of. Furthermore, you will start to create nodes and packages and use ROS with examples using Turtlesim.

The ROS architecture has been designed and divided into three sections or levels of concepts:

  • The Filesystem level

  • The Computation Graph level

  • The Community level

The first level is the Filesystem level. In this level, a group of concepts are used to explain how ROS is internally formed, the folder structure, and the minimum number of files that it needs to work.

The second level is the Computation Graph level, where communication between processes and systems happens. In this section, we will see all the concepts and mechanisms that ROS has to set up systems, handle all the processes, and communicate with more than a single computer, and so on.

The third level is the Community...