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! IKFast plugin for the ABB IRB 6640 robot


We have seen the MoveIt! package for the ABB robot IRB 6640 model. This robot works with a default numerical solver. In this section, we will discuss how to generate an IK solver plugin using IKFast, a powerful inverse kinematics solver provided within Rosen Diankov's OpenRAVE motion planning software. At the end of this section, we can run the MoveIt! demo of this robot, using our custom inverse kinematic plugin.

In short, we will build an IKFast MoveIt! plugin for robot ABB IRB 66400. This plugin can be selected during the MoveIt! setup wizard or we can mention it in the config/kinematics.yaml file of the moveit-config package.

Prerequisites for developing the MoveIt! IKFast plugin

The following is the configuration we have used for developing the MoveIt! IKFast plugin:

  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64 bit
  • ROS-kinetic desktop-full
  • Open-Rave 0.9

OpenRave and IK Fast modules

OpenRave is a set of command lines and GUI tools for developing, testing...