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

Setting up rviz for the navigation stack


It is good practice to visualize all the possible data to know what the navigation stack does. In this section, we will show you the visualization topic that you must add to rviz to see the correct data sent by the navigation stack. Discussions of each visualization topic that the navigation stack publishes is explained next.

2D pose estimate

The 2D pose estimate (P shortcut) allows the user to initialize the localization system used by the navigation stack by setting the pose of the robot in the world. The navigation stack waits for the new pose of a new topic with the name initialpose. This topic is sent using the rviz windows where we previously changed the name of the topic.

You can see in the following screenshot how you can use initialpose. Click on the 2D Pose Estimate button and click on the map to indicate the initial position of your robot. If you don't do this at the beginning, the robot will start the auto-localization process and try to...