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

Overview of the project


The aim of the project is to build a simple face tracker that can track face only along the horizontal axis of the camera. The face tracker hardware consists of a webcam, Dynamixel servo called AX-12, and a supporting bracket to mount the camera on the servo. The servo tracker will follow the face until it aligns to the center of the image from the webcam. Once it reaches the center, it will stop and wait for face movement. The face detection is done using an OpenCV and ROS interface, and the controlling of the servo is done using a Dynamixel motor driver in ROS.

We are going to create two ROS packages for this complete tracking system; one is for face detection and finding the centroid of the face, and the other is for sending commands to the servo to track the face using the centroid values.

Okay! Let's start discussing the hardware and software prerequisites of this project.

Note

The complete source code of this project can be cloned from the following Git repository...