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

Simulating the robotic arm using Gazebo and ROS


In the previous chapter, we designed a seven-DOF arm. In this section, we will simulate the robot in Gazebo using ROS.

Before starting with Gazebo and ROS, we should install the following packages to work with Gazebo and ROS:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-kinetic-gazebo-msgs ros-kinetic-gazebo-plugins ros-kinetic-gazebo-ros-control

The default version installed from kinetic ROS packages is Gazebo 7.0. The use of each package is as follows:

  • gazebo_ros_pkgs: This contains wrappers and tools for interfacing ROS with Gazebo
  • gazebo-msgs: This contains messages and service data structures for interfacing with Gazebo from ROS
  • gazebo-plugins: This contains Gazebo plugins for sensors, actuators, and so on.
  • gazebo-ros-control: This contains standard controllers to communicate between ROS and Gazebo

After installation, check whether Gazebo is properly installed using the following commands:

$ roscore & rosrun gazebo_ros gazebo

These...