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 ros_control packages


In the preceding section, we discussed the pr2_mechanism packages which build the controllers for PR2. These packages are exclusively designed for PR2, but they will work in robots that are similar to PR2.

To make these packages more generic to all the robots, the pr2_mechanism packages rewritten and formed a new set of packages called ros_control (http://wiki.ros.org/ros_control).

The ros_control implement standard set of generic controllers such as effort_controllers, joint_state_controllers, position_controllers, and velocity controllers for any kind of robots.

We have already used these ROS controllers from ros_control in Chapter 3, Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo. The ros_control is still in development. The building procedure of the controllers is almost similar to PR2 controllers.

You can go through the available wiki page of ros_control for building new controls at https://github.com/ros-controls/ros_control/wiki.

You will get a sample controller...