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)

Understanding ChefBot ROS launch files

We will now look at the functions of each of the launch files of the ChefBot_bringup package:

  • robot_standalone.launch: The main function of this launch file is to start nodes such as launchpad_node, pid_velocity, diff_tf, and twist_to_motor to get sensor values from the robot and to send the command velocity to the robot.
  • keyboard_teleop.launch: This launch file will start teleoperation using the keyboard. It starts the ChefBot_keyboard_teleop.py node to perform the keyboard teleoperation.
  • 3dsensor.launch : This file will launch the Kinect OpenNI drivers and start publishing the RGB and depth stream. It will also start the depth-to-laser scanner node, which will convert point cloud data to laser scan data.
  • gmapping_demo.launch: This launch file will start the SLAM gmapping nodes to map the area surrounding the robot.
  • amcl_demo.launch: Using...