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

Collision checking with a robot arm using MoveIt!


Along with motion planning and the IK solving algorithm, one of the most important tasks that is done in parallel in MoveIt! is collision checking, and its avoidance. MoveIt! can handle both self-collisions and environmental collisions exploiting the built-in Flexible Collision Library (FCL) (http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/FCL/fcl_docs/webpage/generated/index.html), an open source project that implements various collision-detection and-avoidance algorithms. MoveIt! takes the power of FCL and handles the collision inside the planning scene using a collision_detection::CollisionWorld class. The MoveIt! collision checking includes objects, such as meshes; primitive shapes, such as boxes and cylinders, and OctoMap. The OctoMap (http://octomap.github.io/) library implements a 3D occupancy grid, called an octree, which consists of probabilistic information regarding obstacles in the environment. The MoveIt! package can build an OctoMap using 3D point...