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

A 3D model of our robot in ROS


The way ROS uses the 3D model of a robot or its parts, whether to simulate them or to simply help the developers in their daily work, is by means of the URDF files.

Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) is an XML format that describes a robot, its parts, its joints, dimensions, and so on. Every time you see a 3D robot on ROS, for example, the PR2 (Willow Garage) or the Robonaut (NASA), a URDF file is associated with it. In the next few sections, we will learn how to create this file, as well as the format for defining different values.