Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular robotics software frameworks in research and industry. It has various features for implementing different capabilities in a robot without implementing them from scratch. This book starts by showing you the fundamentals of ROS so you understand the basics of differential robots. Then, you'll learn about robot modeling and how to design and simulate it using ROS. Moving on, we'll design robot hardware and interfacing actuators. Then, you'll learn to configure and program depth sensors and LIDARs using ROS. Finally, you'll create a GUI for your robot using the Qt framework. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a clear idea of how to integrate and assemble everything into a robot and how to bundle the software package.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Working with a 3D model of the robot using Blender

In this section, we will design the 3D model of the robot. The 3D model is mainly used for simulation purposes. The modeling will be done using Blender. The version must be greater than 2.6 because we only tested the tutorials on these versions.

The following screenshot shows the Blender workspace and tools that can be used to work with 3D models:

Blender 3D CAD tools

The main reason why we are using Blender here is that we can model the robot using Python scripts. Blender has an inbuilt Python interpreter and a Python script editor for coding purposes. We will not discuss the user interface of Blender here. You can find a good tutorial of Blender on its website. Refer to the following link to learn about Blender's user interface:
http://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/
.

Let's start coding in Blender using Python...