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 COLLADA file of a robot to work with OpenRave


In this section, we can discuss how to convert the robot URDF model to the collada file(.dae) format to work with OpenRave. There is a ROS package called collada_urdf, which contains nodes to convert URDF into collada files. The URDF file of ABB-IRB 6640 model is on abb_irb6600_support/urdf folder named irb6640.urdf. Copy this file into your working folder and run the following command for the conversion:

Start roscore$ roscore

Run the conversion command. We need to mention the URDF file and the output DAE file:

$ rosrun collada_urdf urdf_to_collada irb6640.urdf irb6640.dae

 

In most of the cases, this command fails because most of the URDF file contains STL meshes and it may not convert into DAE as we expected. If the robot meshes in, in DAE format, it will work fine. If it happens, follow this procedure:

  • Install Meshlab tool for viewing and editing meshes using the following command:
$ sudo apt-get   install meshlab   
  • Open meshes present...