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 - OpenCV interfacing packages


OpenCV is one of the popular open source real time computer vision libraries, which is mainly written in C/C++. OpenCV comes with a BSD license and is free for academic and commercial application. OpenCV can be programmed using C/C++, Python, and Java, and it has multi-platform support such as Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, and iOS. OpenCV has tons of computer vision APIs, which can be used for implementing computer vision applications. The web page of OpenCV library is http://opencv.org/.

The OpenCV library is interfaced to ROS via ROS stack called vision_opencv. vision_opencv consists of two important packages for interfacing OpenCV to ROS. They are:

  • cv_bridge: The cv_bridge package contains a library that provides APIs for converting the OpenCV image data type cv::Mat to the ROS image message called sensor_msgs/Image and vice versa. In short, it can act as a bridge between OpenCV and ROS. We can use OpenCV APIs to process the image and convert...