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

Chapter 3. Working with 3D Robot Modeling in ROS

The first phase of robot manufacturing is design and modeling. We can design and model a robot using CAD tools such as AutoCAD, SOLIDWORKS, and Blender. One of the main purposes of robot modeling is simulation.

The robotic simulation tool can check for critical flaws in the robot's design and can confirm that the robot will work before it goes to the manufacturing phase.

The virtual robot model must have all the characteristics of the real hardware. The shape of a robot may or may not look like the actual robot, but it must be abstract, which has all the physical characteristics of the actual robot.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss the designing of two robots. One is a seven Degrees of Freedom (DOF) manipulator, and the other is a differential drive robot. In the upcoming chapters, we will look at simulation, how to build the real hardware, and interfacing with ROS.

If we are planning to create the 3D model of the robot and simulate it...