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

Interfacing non-Arduino boards to ROS


Arduino boards are commonly used boards in robots, but what happens if we want a board that is more powerful than Arduino? In such a case, we may want to write our own driver for the board, which can convert the serial messages into topics.

We will look at the interfacing of a non-Arduino board called Tiva C Launchpad to ROS, using a Python driver node, in Chapter 11:Building and Interfacing Differential Drive Mobile Robot Hardware in ROS. This chapter is about interfacing a real mobile robot to ROS, and the robot using the Tiva C Launchpad board for its operation.

Setting ROS on Odroid-XU4 and Raspberry Pi 2

Odroid-XU4 and Raspberry Pi2 are single board computers which have a low form factor the size of a credit card. These single board computers can be installed in robots and we can install ROS on them.

The main specifications comparison of Odroid-XU4 and Raspberry Pi2 is shown next:

Device

Odroid-XU4

Raspberry Pi 2

CPU

2.0 GHz Quad core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU...