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

Getting started with self-driving cars


Just imagine a car driving by itself without the help of anyone. Self-driving cars are robot cars that can think about and decide how to reach the destination. The passenger only needs to specify the destination, and the robot car will take you to the destination safely. To convert an ordinary car into a robotic car, we should add some robotic sensors to it. We know that for a robot, there should be at least three important capabilities. It should be able to sense, plan, and act. Self-driving cars satisfy all these requirements. We'll discuss all the components we need for building a self-driving car. Before discussing the building of self-driving car, let's go through some milestones in self-driving car development.

History of autonomous vehicles

The concept of automating vehicles started long ago. From 1930, people have been trying to automate cars and aircraft, but the hype of self-driving cars increased between 2004 and 2013. To encourage autonomous...