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)

Getting Started with Robot Operating System

The main aim of this book is to teach you how to build an autonomous mobile robot from scratch. The robot will be programmed using ROS and its operations will be simulated using a simulator called Gazebo. You will also see the robot's mechanical design, circuit design, embedded programming, and high-level software programming using ROS in the upcoming chapters.

In this chapter, we will start with the basics of ROS, how to install it, how to write a basic application using ROS and Python, and the basics of Gazebo. This chapter will be the foundation of your autonomous robotics project. If you are already aware of the basics of ROS, and already have it installed on your system, you may skip this chapter. However, you can still go through this chapter later to refresh your memory as to the basics of ROS.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Introduction to ROS
  • Installing ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04.3
  • Introducing, installing, and testing Gazebo

Let's start programming robots using Python and Robot Operating System (ROS).