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 the MoveIt! IKFast plugin for the ABB-IRB6640 robot


We have seen the MoveIt! package for the ABB robot IRB 6640 model. But the robot is working using the KDL plugin, which is a default numerical solver. For generating IK solver plugin using IKFast, we can follow the procedure mentioned in this section. At the end of this section, we can run the MoveIt! demo of this robot using our custom moveit-ikfast plugin.

In short, we will build an IKFast MoveIt! plugin for robot ABB -IRB 66400. This plugin can be selected during the MoveIt! setup wizard or we can mention it in the config/kinematics.yaml file of the moveit-config package

Prerequisites for developing the MoveIt! IKFast plugin

The following is the configuration we have used for developing the MoveIt! IKFast plugin:

  • Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS x86_64 bit

  • ROS-Indigo desktop-full, Version 1.11.13

  • Open-Rave 0.9

OpenRave and IK Fast Module

OpenRave is a set of command line and GUI tools for developing, testing, and deploying motion planning algorithms...