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 the MoveIt! configuration for an industrial robot


The procedure for creating the MoveIt! interface for industrial robots is the same as the other ordinary robot manipulators, except in some standard conventions. The following procedure gives a clear idea about these standard conventions:

  1. Launch the MoveIt! setup assistant by using the following command:
$ roslaunch moveit_setup_assistant setup_assistant.launch
  1. Load the URDF from the robot description folder or convert xacro to the URDF and load to the setup assistant.
  1. Create a Self-Collisiona matrix with a Sampling Density of about ~ 80,000. This value can increase the collision checking in the arm.
  2. Add a Virtual Joints matrix, as shown in the following screenshot. Here the virtual and parent frame names are arbitrary:

Figure 3: Adding MoveIt! - virtual joints

  1. In the next step, we are adding Planning Groups for manipulator and End Effector. Here, also, the group names are arbitrary. The default plugin is KDL; we can change it even after...