Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By: Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

In this day and age, robotics has been gaining a lot of traction in various industries where consistency and perfection matter. Automation is achieved via robotic applications and various platforms that support robotics. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book focuses on the most stable release of ROS (Kinetic Kame), discusses advanced concepts, and effectively teaches you programming using ROS. We begin with aninformative overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS works. During the course of this book, you’ll learn to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt! motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. Learn to leverage several ROS packages to embrace your robot models. After covering robot manipulation and navigation, you’ll get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. Vision sensors are a key component of robots, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor and image elaboration, its interface in ROS and programming. You’ll also understand the hardware interface and simulation of complex robots to ROS and ROS Industrial. At the end of this book, you’ll discover the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
www.PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Interfacing 7 DOF DYNAMIXEL-based robotic arm to ROS MoveIt!


In this section, we will discuss a 7 DOF robot manipulator called COOL arm-5000, which is manufactured by a company called ASIMOV Robotics (http://asimovrobotics.com/), and is shown in the following figure. The robot is built using DYNAMIXEL servos. We will see how to interface a Dynamixel-based robotic arm to ROS using dynamixel_controllers:

Figure 15: COOL robotic Arm.

COOL arm robots are fully compatible with ROS and MoveIt!, and are mainly used in education and research. Following are the details of the arms:

  • Degree of Freedom: 7 DOF
  • Types of Actuators: DYNAMIXEL MX-64 and MX-28
  • List of Joints: Shoulder Roll, Shoulder Pitch, Elbow Roll, Elbow Pitch, Wrist Yaw, Wrist Pitch, and Wrist Roll
  • Payload: 5 Kg
  • Reach: 1 meter
  • Work Volume: 2.09 m3
  • Repeatability: +/- 0.05 mm
  • Gripper with 3 fingers

Creating a controller package for a COOL arm robot

The first step is to create a controller package for a COOL arm for interfacing to ROS. The COOL arm...