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

Chapter 14. ROS for Industrial Robots

Until now, we have been mainly discussing interfacing personal and research robots with ROS, but one of the main areas where robots are extensively used is in industry. Does ROS support industrial robots? Are there any companies that use ROS for handling manufacturing processes? The ROS-Industrial package comes with a solution to interface and control industrial robot manipulators to ROS, using its powerful tools, such as MoveIt!, Gazebo, and RViz.

 

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Understanding and getting started with ROS-Industrial
  • Creating a URDF for an industrial robot and interfacing it with MoveIt!
  • Working with MoveIt! configuration of a Universal Robots arm and ABB robots
  • Understanding ROS-Industrial robot support packages
  • Understanding ROS-Industrial robot client and driver packages
  • Working with IKfast algorithms and the MoveIt! IKFast plugin

Let's start with a brief overview of ROS-Industrial.