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 5. Simulating Robots Using ROS and V-REP

Having learned how to simulate robots with Gazebo, in this chapter, we will discuss how to use another powerful and famous simulation software: V-REP (Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform, http://www.coppeliarobotics.com).

V-REP is a multi-platform robotic simulator developed by Coppelia Robotics. It offers many simulation models of popular industrial and mobile robots ready to be used, and different functionalities that can be easily integrated and combined through a dedicated API. In addition, V-REP can operate with ROS using a communication interface that allows us to control the simulation scene and the robots via topics and services. Like Gazebo, V-REP can be used as a standalone software, while an external plugin must be installed to work with ROS.

In this chapter, we will learn how to set up the V-REP simulator and install the ROS communication bridge, discussing some initial codes to understand how it works. We will show how to interact...