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 a robot model for the differential drive mobile robot


A differential wheeled robot will have two wheels connected on opposite sides of the robot chassis which is supported by one or two caster wheels. The wheels will control the speed of the robot by adjusting individual velocity. If the two motors are running at the same speed it will move forward or backward. If a wheel is running slower than the other, the robot will turn to the side of the lower speed. If we want to turn the robot to the left side, reduce the velocity of the left wheel compared to the right and vice versa.

There are two supporting wheels called caster wheels that will support the robot and freely rotate according to the movement of the main wheels.

The UDRF model of this robot is present in the cloned ROS package. The final robot model is shown as follows:

Figure 12 : 3D model of differential drive mobile robot

The preceding robot has five joints and five links. The two main joints are two wheel joints and the other...