Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Carol Fairchild, Lentin Joseph, Dr. Thomas L. Harman
Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Carol Fairchild, Lentin Joseph, Dr. Thomas L. Harman

Overview of this book

ROS is a robust robotics framework that works regardless of hardware architecture or hardware origin. It standardizes most layers of robotics functionality from device drivers to process control and message passing to software package management. But apart from just plain functionality, ROS is a great platform to learn about robotics itself and to simulate, as well as actually build, your first robots. This does not mean that ROS is a platform for students and other beginners; on the contrary, ROS is used all over the robotics industry to implement flying, walking and diving robots, yet implementation is always straightforward, and never dependent on the hardware itself. ROS Robotics has been the standard introduction to ROS for potential professionals and hobbyists alike since the original edition came out; the second edition adds a gradual introduction to all the goodness available with the Kinetic Kame release. By providing you with step-by-step examples including manipulator arms and flying robots, the authors introduce you to the new features. The book is intensely practical, with space given to theory only when absolutely necessary. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience on controlling robots with the best possible framework.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ROS Robotics By Example Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

ROS commands summary


If you are communicating with ROS via the terminal window, it is possible to issue commands to ROS to explore or control nodes in a package from the command prompt, as listed in the following table:

Command

Action

Example usage and subcommand examples

roscore

Starts the Master

$ roscore

rosrun

Runs an executable program and creates nodes

$ rosrun [package name] [executable name]

rosnode

Shows information about nodes and lists the active nodes

$ rosnode info [node name]

$ rosnode<subcommand>

Subcommand: list

rostopic

Shows information about ROS topics

$ rostopic<subcommand><topic name>

Subcommands: echo, info, and type

rosmsg

Shows information about the message types

$ rosmsg<subcommand> [package name]/ [message type]

Subcommands: show, type, and list

rosservice

Displays the runtime information about various services and allows the display of messages being sent to a topic

$ rosservice<subcommand> [service name]

Subcommands: args, call, find, info, list, and type

rosparam

Used to get and set parameters (data) used by nodes

$ rosparam<subcommand> [parameter]

Subcommands: get, set, list, and delete

The website (http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/CommandLineTools) describes many ROS commands. The table lists some important ones. However, these examples only cover a few of the possible variations of the commands.