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

Setting up V-REP with ROS


Before starting to work with V-REP, we need to install it in our system and compile the ROS packages needed to establish the communication bridge between ROS and the simulation scene. V-REP is a cross-platform software, available for different operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is developed by Coppelia Robotics GmbH and is distributed with both free educational and commercial licenses. Download the last version of the V-REP simulator from the Coppelia Robotics download page: http://www.coppeliarobotics.com/downloads.html, choosing the Linux version of the V-REP PRO EDU software.

In this chapter, we will refer to the V-REP version v3.4.0. You can download this version, if already available on the website, using the following command in any desired directory:

    $ wget http://coppeliarobotics.com/files/V-REP_PRO_EDU_V3_4_0_Linux.tar.gz

After completing the download, extract the archive:

$ tar -zxvf V-REP_PRO_EDU_V3_4_0_Linux.tar.gz

To easily access...