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 - PCL interfacing packages


The point cloud data can be defined as a group of data points in some coordinate system. In 3D, it has X, Y, and Z coordinates. PCL library is an open source project for handling 2D/3D image and point clouds processing.

Like OpenCV, it is under BSD license and free for academic and commercial purposes. It is also a cross platform, which has support in Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and Android/iOS.

The library consists of standard algorithms for filtering, segmentation, feature estimation, and so on, which is required to implement different point cloud applications. The main web page of point cloud library is http://pointclouds.org/.

The point cloud data can be acquired by sensors such as Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel Real Sense, and such others. We can use this data for robotic applications such as robot object manipulation and grasping. PCL is tightly integrated into ROS for handling point cloud data from various sensors. The perception_pcl stack is the...