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

Interfacing USB webcams in ROS


We can start interfacing with an ordinary webcam or a laptop cam in ROS. There are no exact specific packages for webcam - ROS interfaces. If the camera is working in Ubuntu/Linux, it may be supported by the ROS driver too. After plugging the camera, check whether a /dev/videoX device file has been created, or check with some application such as Cheese, VLC, and such others. The guide to check whether the web cam is supported on Ubuntu is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam.

We can find the video devices present on the system using the following command:

$ ls /dev/ | grep video

If you get an output of video0, you can confirm a USB cam is available for use.

After ensuring the webcam support in Ubuntu, we can install a ROS webcam driver called usb_cam using the following command:

  • In ROS Jade
$ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-usb-cam
  • In ROS Indigo
$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-usb-cam

We can install the latest package of usb_cam from the source code...