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)

Interfacing Orbbec Astra with ROS

One of the alternatives to Kinect is Orbbec Astra. There are ROS drivers available for Astra, and we can see how to set up that driver and get the image, depth, and point cloud from this sensor.

Installing the Astra–ROS driver

The complete instructions to set up the Astra-ROS driver in Ubuntu are mentioned at https://github.com/orbbec/ros_astra_camera and http://wiki.ros.org/Sensors/OrbbecAstra. After installing the driver, you can launch it using the following command:

    $ roslaunch astra_launch astra.launch  

You can also install the Astra driver from the ROS package repository. Here is the command to install those packages:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-astra-camera
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