Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

The area of robotics is gaining huge momentum among corporate people, researchers, hobbyists, and students. The major challenge in robotics is its controlling software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book discusses the advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. It starts with deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. After discussing robot manipulation and navigation in robots, you will get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. One of the essential ingredients of robots are vision sensors, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor, its interfacing in ROS, and its programming. You will discuss the hardware interfacing and simulation of complex robot to ROS and ROS Industrial (Package used for interfacing industrial robots). Finally, you will get to know the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating URDF for an industrial robot


Creating the URDF file for an ordinary robot and industrial robot are the same, but in industrial robots, there are some standards that should be strictly followed during its URDF modeling, which are as follows:

  • Simplify the URDF design: The URDF file should be simple and readable and only need the important tags

  • Common design: Developing a common design formula for all industrial robots by various vendors

  • Modularizing URDF: The URDF needs to modularize using XACRO macros and it can be included in a large URDF file without much hassle.

The following points are the main difference in the URDF design followed by ROS-I.

  • Collision-Aware: The industrial robot IK planners are collision aware so the URDF should contain accurate collision 3D mesh for each link. Every link in the robot should export to STL or DAE with a proper coordinate system. The coordinate system which ROS-I is following are X-axis pointing forward and Z-axis pointing up when each joint is...