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

Understanding pr2_mechanism packages


The pr2_mechanism stack contain packages for writing ROS real-time controllers. The first package that we are going to discuss is the pr2_controller_interface package.

pr2_controller_interface package

A basic ROS real-time controller must inherit a base class called pr2_controller_interface::Controller from this package. This base class contains four important functions: init() , start(), update(), and stop(). The basic structure of the Controller class is given as follows:

namespace pr2_controller_interface
{
  class Controller
  {
  public:
    virtual bool init(pr2_mechanism_model::RobotState *robot,
                     ros::NodeHandle &n);
    virtual void starting();
    virtual void update();
    virtual void stopping();
  };
}

The workflow of the controller class is shown as follows.

Figure 1: Workflow of the controller

Initialization of the controller

The first function executing when a controller is loaded is init(). The init() function will not...