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

Husky – the rover of Clearpath Robotics


The Husky A200 is an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) developed by Clearpath Robotics, one of the spin-off companies of Willow Garage. As we can see in the following picture, it is a rugged, outdoor vehicle, which is equipped with an Axis camera, GPS, and integrates the ROS framework:

Installing the Husky simulator

Here we focus on running Husky on simulation, so just run the following:

sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-husky-simulator

Alternatively, you can clone the repository in order to have the latest version:

git clone git://github.com/clearpathrobotics/husky_simulator.git

Running Husky on simulation

We load an empty map in Gazebo:

roslaunch husky_gazebo map_empty.launch

Now just load Husky with the following:

roslaunch husky_gazebo husky_base.launch

This can also be done manually within Gazebo. You will see the robot as shown in the following screenshot:

Then, we can use the PR2 tele-operation node to move it, so just run the following:

rosrun pr2_teleop...