Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández
Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández

Overview of this book

<p>Both the amateur and the professional roboticist who has ever tried their hand at robotics programming will have faced with the cumbersome task of starting from scratch, usually reinventing the wheel. ROS comes with a great number of already working functionalities, and this book takes you from the first steps to the most elaborate designs possible within this software framework.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" is full of practical examples that will help you to understand the framework from the very beginning. Build your own robot applications in a simulated environment and share your knowledge with the large community supporting ROS.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" starts with the basic concepts and usage of ROS in a very straightforward and practical manner. It is a painless introduction to the fascinating world of robotics, covering sensor integration, modeling, simulation, computer vision, and navigation algorithms, among other topics.</p> <p>After the first two chapters, concepts like topics, messages, and nodes will become daily bread. Make your robot see with HD cameras, or navigate avoiding obstacles with range sensors. Furthermore, thanks to the contributions of the vast ROS community, your robot will be able to navigate autonomously, and even recognize and interact with you, in a matter of minutes.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" will give you all the background you need to know in order to start in the fascinating world of robotics and program your own robot. Simply, you put the limit!</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


For people learning robotics, the ability to have access to real robots is fun and useful, but not everyone has access to a real robot. This is why simulators exist.

In this chapter you have learned how to create a 3D model of your own robot. This includes a detailed explanation that guides you in the tasks of adding textures and creating joints, and also describes how to move the robot with a node.

Then we have introduced Gazebo, a simulator where you can load the 3D model of your robot and simulate it moving and sensing a virtual world. This simulator is widely used by the ROS community and it already supports many real robots in simulation.

Indeed, we have seen how to re-use parts of other robots to design ours in a nutshell. In particular, we have included a gripper and added sensors, such as a laser range finder.

Hence, it is not mandatory to create a robot from scratch to start using the simulator. The community has developed a lot of robots and you can download the code, execute...