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

Chapter 2. Creating Your First Two-Wheeled ROS Robot (in Simulation)

Your first robot will be created in simulation so that even if you do not have a physical robot to learn ROS on, you will be able to follow along and do the exercises in this book. We will build a simple two-wheeled robot named dd_robot (dd is short for differential drive). We will build a Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) file for the robot that will describe the main components of our robot and enable it to be visualized and controlled by ROS tools, such as rviz and Gazebo. Rviz is a visualization tool in which we will view our dd_robot URDF file as we build it in increments. When the visual model is complete, we will modify the URDF file for use in the Gazebo simulator. In Gazebo, we can view the effects of physics on our model as we move our model around the 3D environment.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • An introduction to rviz, installation instructions, and instructions for use

  • How to create...