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

Writing a RViz plugin for teleoperation


In this chapter, we design a teleoperation commander in which we can manually enter the teleoperation topic, linear velocity, and angular velocity, as shown in the following:

Figure 7: RViz teleop plugin

The following is a detailed procedure to build this plugin.

Methodology of building RViz plugin

Before starting to build this plugin, we should know how to do it. The standard method to build a ROS plugin is applicable for this plugin too. The difference is that the RViz plugin is GUI based. The RViz is written using a GUI framework called Qt, so we need to create a GUI in Qt, and using Qt APIs, we have get the GUI values and send them to the ROS system.

The following steps describe how this teleoperation RViz plugin is going to work:

  • The dockable panel will have a Qt GUI interface and the user can input the topic, linear velocity, and angular velocity of teleoperation from the GUI.

  • Collect the user input from GUI using Qt signals/slots and publish the values...