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

Tutorials to practise with ROS


It is time for you to practise what you have learned until now. In upcoming sections, you will see examples for you to practise along with the creation of packages, using nodes, using Parameter Server, and moving a simulated robot with Turtlesim.

Navigating through the ROS filesystem

As explained before, ROS provides a number of command-line tools for navigating through the filesystem. In this subsection, we will explain the most used ones, with examples.

To get information about the packages and stacks in our environment, such as their paths, dependencies, and so on, we can use rospack and rosstack. On the other hand, to move through packages and stacks, as well as listing their contents, we will use roscd and rosls.

For example, if you want to find the path of the turtlesim package, you can use the following command:

$ rospack find turtlesim

Which will then result in the following output:

/opt/ros/kinetic/share/turtlesim

The same thing happens with the metapackages...