Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By: Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

In this day and age, robotics has been gaining a lot of traction in various industries where consistency and perfection matter. Automation is achieved via robotic applications and various platforms that support robotics. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book focuses on the most stable release of ROS (Kinetic Kame), discusses advanced concepts, and effectively teaches you programming using ROS. We begin with aninformative overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS works. During the course of this book, you’ll learn to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt! motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. Learn to leverage several ROS packages to embrace your robot models. After covering robot manipulation and navigation, you’ll get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. Vision sensors are a key component of robots, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor and image elaboration, its interface in ROS and programming. You’ll also understand the hardware interface and simulation of complex robots to ROS and ROS Industrial. At the end of this book, you’ll discover the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
www.PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Understanding ROS - PCL interfacing packages


The point cloud data can be defined as a group of data points in some coordinate system. In 3D, it has x, y, and z coordinates. The PCL library is an open source project for handling 2D/3D images and point cloud processing.

Like OpenCV, it is under BSD license, and free for academic and commercial purposes. It is also a cross-platform packages that has support in Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android/iOS.

The library consists of standard algorithms for filtering, segmentation, feature estimation, and so on, which are required to implement different point cloud applications. The main web page of the point cloud library can be found at http://pointclouds.org/.

The point cloud data can be acquired by sensors such as Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel Real Sense, and others. We can use this data for robotic applications, such as robot object manipulation and grasping. PCL is tightly integrated into ROS for handling point cloud data from various sensors. The...