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

Installing MoveIt!


Let's start with installing MoveIt!. The installation procedure is very simple and is just a single command. Using the following commands, we install the MoveIt! core, a set of plugins ad planners for ROS Kinetic:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-moveit ros-kinetic-moveit-plugins ros-kinetic-moveit-planners

MoveIt! architecture

Let's start with MoveIt! and its architecture. Understanding the architecture of MoveIt! helps to program and interface the robot to MoveIt!. We will quickly go through the architecture and the important concepts of MoveIt!, and start interfacing and programming our robots.

Here is the MoveIt! architecture, included in their official web page, at http://moveit.ros.org/documentation/concepts:

Figure 1: MoveIt! architecture diagram

The move_group node

We can say that move_group is the heart of MoveIt!, as this node acts as an integrator of the various components of the robot and delivers actions/services according to the user's needs.

From the architecture...