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

Interfacing Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro in ROS


The webcams that we have worked with until now can only provide 2D visual information of the surroundings. For getting 3D information about the surroundings, we have to use 3D vision sensors or range finders, such as laser finders. Some of the 3D vision sensors that we are discussing in this chapter are Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel Real sense, and Hokuyo laser scanner:

Figure 7: Top: Kinect; bottom: Asus Xtion Pro.

The first two sensors we are going to discuss are Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro. Both of these devices need the OpenNI (Open source Natural Interaction) driver library for operating in the Linux system. OpenNI acts as a middleware between the 3D vision devices and the application software. The OpenNI driver is integrated to ROS and we can install these drivers by using the following commands. These packages help to interface the OpenNI supported devices, such as Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-openni-launch ros...