Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects

Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System is one of the most widely used software frameworks for robotic research and for companies to model, simulate, and prototype robots. Applying your knowledge of ROS to actual robotics is much more difficult than people realize, but this title will give you what you need to create your own robotics in no time! This book is packed with over 14 ROS robotics projects that can be prototyped without requiring a lot of hardware. The book starts with an introduction of ROS and its installation procedure. After discussing the basics, you’ll be taken through great projects, such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find ROS robotics applications for beginner, intermediate, and expert levels inside! This book will be the perfect companion for a robotics enthusiast who really wants to do something big in the field.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
ROS Robotics Projects
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

ROS tools


ROS has a variety of GUI and command-line tools to inspect and debug messages. Let's look at some commonly used ones.

Rviz (ROS Visualizer)

Rviz (http://wiki.ros.org/rviz) is one of the 3D visualizers available in ROS to visualize 2D and 3D values from ROS topics and parameters. Rviz helps visualize data such as robot models, robot 3D transform data (TF), point cloud, laser and image data, and a variety of different sensor data.

Figure 10: Point cloud data visualized in Rviz

rqt_plot

The rqt_plot program (http://wiki.ros.org/rqt_plot) is a tool for plotting scalar values that are in the form of ROS topics. We can provide a topic name in the Topic box.

Figure 11: rqt_plot

rqt_graph

The rqt_graph (http://wiki.ros.org/rqt_graph) ROS GUI tool can visualize the graph of interconnection between ROS nodes.

Figure 12: rqt_graph

Note

The complete list of ROS tools is available at the following link: http://wiki.ros.org/Tools