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

Best practices in ROS


This section gives you a brief idea of the best practices that can be followed when we develop something with ROS. ROS provides detailed tutorials about its QA (quality assurance) process. A QA process is a detailed developer guide that includes C++ and Python code style guides, naming conventions, and so on. First, we will discuss the ROS C++ coding styles.

ROS C++ coding style guide

ROS C++ nodes follow a coding style to make the code more readable, debuggable, and maintainable. If the code is properly styled, it will be very easy to reuse and contribute to the current code. In this section, we will quickly go through some commonly used coding styles.

Standard naming conventions used in ROS

Here we are using the text HelloWorld to demonstrate the naming patterns we use in ROS:

  • HelloWorld: This name starts with an uppercase letter, and each new word starts with an uppercase letter with no spaces or underscores.
  • helloWorld: In this naming convention, the first letter will...