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

Setting Robotics Toolbox in MATLAB


Here is the link to download a trial or purchase the Robotics Toolbox in MATLAB (https://in.mathworks.com/products/robotics.html). This toolbox is compatible with MATLAB version 2013 onward. If you don't have MATLAB, you can test the chapter's code using a trial version; if you have it, buy or download a trial version of Robotic Toolbox.

Basic ROS functions in MATLAB

After setting up Robotics Toolbox in MATLAB, we can start working on the important functions of MATLAB that are used to interact with a ROS network. Let's look at them with examples.

Initializing a ROS network

Before running a ROS node, we have to run the roscore command, right? The roscore command will start a ROS master, and other ROS nodes can find each other through it. In MATLAB, instead of the roscore command, we can use the rosinit function to start a ROS master.

Figure 2 : The rosinit function in MATLAB

The rosinit function can start a ROS master and a global node that is connected to the...