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

Step 1 – Launching the Setup Assistant tool


  • To start the MoveIt! Setup Assistant tool, we can use the following command:

    $ roslaunch moveit_setup_assistant setup_assistant.launch
    
  • This will bring up a window with two choices: Create New MoveIt! Configuration Package or Edit Existing MoveIt! Configuration Package. Here we are creating a new package, so we need that option. If we have a MoveIt! package already, then we can select the second option.

  • Click on the button Create New MoveIt! Configuration Package, which will bring a new screen, as shown next:

    Figure 4 : MoveIt Setup Assistant

  • In this step, the wizard asks for the URDF model of the new robot. To give the URDF file, click on the Browse button and navigate to mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg/urdf/ seven_dof_arm.xacro. Choose this file and press the Load button to load the URDF. We can either give the robot model as pure URDF or xacro, if we give xacro, the tool will convert to URDF internally.

  • If the robot model is successfully parsed...