Book Image

ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

By : Anil Mahtani, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo, Luis Sánchez, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

By: Anil Mahtani, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo, Luis Sánchez, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

This learning path is designed to help you program and build your robots using open source ROS libraries and tools. We start with the installation and basic concepts, then continue with the more complex modules available in ROS, such as sensor and actuator integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, computer vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. We then discuss advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. You'll get a deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. We'll go through great projects such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find beginner, intermediate, and expert ROS robotics applications inside! It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition ? Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming ? ROS Robotics Projects
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Preface
Bibliography
Index

Creating the ROS package for the robot description


Before creating the URDF file for the robot, let's create a ROS package in the catkin workspace so that the robot model keeps using the following command:

$ catkin_create_pkg mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg roscpp tf 
 geometry_msgs urdf rviz xacro 

The package mainly depends on the urdf and xacro packages, and we can create the urdf file of the robot inside this package and create launch files to display the created urdf in RViz. The full package is available on the following Git repository, you can clone the repository for a reference to implement this package or you can get the package from the section's source code:

$ git clone 
 https://github.com/qboticslabs/mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg.git

Before creating the urdf file for this robot, let's create three folders called urdf, meshes, and launch inside the package folder. The urdf folder can be used to keep the urdf/xacro files that we are going to create. The meshes folder keeps...