Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular robotics software frameworks in research and industry. It has various features for implementing different capabilities in a robot without implementing them from scratch. This book starts by showing you the fundamentals of ROS so you understand the basics of differential robots. Then, you'll learn about robot modeling and how to design and simulate it using ROS. Moving on, we'll design robot hardware and interfacing actuators. Then, you'll learn to configure and program depth sensors and LIDARs using ROS. Finally, you'll create a GUI for your robot using the Qt framework. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a clear idea of how to integrate and assemble everything into a robot and how to bundle the software package.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating a URDF model of the robot

The robot model in ROS contains packages to model the various aspects of the robot, which is specified in the XML Robot Description Format. The core package of this stack is URDF, which parses URDF files and constructs an object model of the robot.

Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) is an XML specification to describe the model of a robot. We can represent the following features of the robot using URDF:

  • The kinematic and dynamic description of the robot
  • The visual representation of the robot
  • The collision model of the robot

The description of the robot consists of a set of links (parts), elements, and a set of joint elements, which connect these links together. A typical robot description is shown in the following code:

 
<robot name="chefbot"> 
<link> ... </link> 
<link> ... </link> 
<link&gt...