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 ROS package


The ROS packages are the basic unit of the ROS system. We can create a ROS package, build it, and release it to the public. The current distribution of ROS we are using is kinetic. We are using the catkin build system to build ROS packages. A build system is responsible for generating 'targets' (executable/libraries) from a raw source code that can be used by an end user. In older distributions, such as Electric and Fuerte, rosbuild was the build system. Because of the various flaws of rosbuild, catkin came into existence, which is basically based on Cross Platform Make (CMake). This has a lot of advantages, such as porting the package into another operating system, such as Windows. If an OS supports CMake and Python, catkin -based packages can be easily ported into it.

The first requirement work with ROS packages is to create a ROS catkin workspace. After installed ROS, we can create and build a catkin_workspace called catkin_ws:

$ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src

To compile...