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

Low-cost LIDAR sensors


This is an add-on section for hobbyists. If you are planning to build a miniature model of a self-driving car, you can use the following LIDAR sensors.

Sweep LIDAR

The Sweep 360-degree rotating LIDAR (http://scanse.io/) has a range of 40 meters. Compared to high-end LIDARs such as Velodyne, it is very cheap and good for research and hobby projects:

Figure 28: Sweep LIDAR

There is a good ROS interface available for this sensor. Here's the link to the Sweep sensor ROS package: https://github.com/scanse/sweep-ros. Before building the package, you need to install some dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-pcl-conversions ros-kinetic-pointcloud-to-laserscan

Now you can simply copy the sweep-ros package to your Catkin workspace and build it using the catkin_make command.

After building the package, you can plug the LIDAR to your PC through a serial-to-USB converter. If you plug this converter into a PC, Ubuntu will assign a device called /dev/ttyUSB0. First, you...