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

Understanding ros_control packages


In the preceding section, we discussed the pr2_mechanism packages which build the controllers for PR2. These packages are exclusively designed for PR2, but they will work in robots that are similar to PR2.

To make these packages more generic to all the robots, the pr2_mechanism packages rewritten and formed a new set of packages called ros_control (http://wiki.ros.org/ros_control).

The ros_control implement standard set of generic controllers such as effort_controllers , joint_state_controllers, position_controllers, and velocity controllers for any kind of robots.

We have already used these ROS controllers from ros_control in Chapter 11, Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo. The ros_control is still in development. The building procedure of the controllers is almost similar to PR2 controllers.

You can go through the available wiki page of ros_control for building new controls at https://github.com/ros-controls/ros_control/wiki.

You will get a sample controller...