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

Creating a URDF for an industrial robot


Creating the URDF file for an ordinary robot and an industrial robot are the same, but industrial robots require some standards that should be strictly followed during their URDF modeling, which are as follows:

  • Simplify the URDF design: The URDF file should be simple and readable and only need the important tags
  • Develop a common design: Develop a common design formula for all industrial robots by various vendors
  • Modularize the URDF: The URDF needs to be modularized using XACRO macros and it can be included in a large URDF file without much hassle

The following points are the main differences in the URDF design followed by ROS-I.

  • Collision-aware: The industrial robot IK planners are collision-aware, so the URDF should contain an accurate collision 3D mesh for each link. Every link in the robot should export to STL or DAE with a proper coordinate system. The coordinate system that ROS-I is following is X-axes pointing forward and Z-axes pointing up when each...