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 robotic arm simulation model for Gazebo


We can create the simulation model for a robotic arm by updating the existing robot description by adding simulation parameters.

We can create the package needed to simulate the robotic arm using the following command:

$ catkin_create_pkg seven_dof_arm_gazebo gazebo_msgs gazebo_plugins gazebo_ros gazebo_ros_control mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg

Alternatively, the full package is available in the following Git repository; you can clone the repository for a reference to implement this package, or you can get the package from the book's source code:

$ git clone  https://github.com/jocacace/seven_dof_arm_gazebo.git

You can see the complete simulation model of the robot in the seven_dof_arm.xacro file, placed in the mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg/urdf/ folder.

The file is filled with URDF tags, which are necessary for the simulation. We will define the sections of collision, inertial, transmission, joints, links, and Gazebo.

To launch the...