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

Understanding the MoveIt! IKFast plugin


One of the default numerical IK solvers in ROS is KDL. KDL is mainly using DOF > 6. In robots DOF <= 6, we can use analytic solvers, which is much faster than numerical solvers, such as KDL. Most of the industrial arms have DOF <= 6, so it will be good if we make an analytical solver plugin for each arm. The robot will work on the KDL solver too, but if we want a fast IK solution, we can choose something such as the IKFast module to generate analytical solver-based plugins for MoveIt!. We can check which are the IKFast plugin packages present in the robot (for example, universal robots and ABB):

  • ur_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins of UR-5 and UR-10 robots from Universal Robotics
  • abb_irb2400_moveit_plugins/irb2400_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins for the ABB robot model IRB 2400

We can go through the procedures to build an IKFast plugin for MoveIt!. It will be useful when we create an IK solver plugin...