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

Simulating a self-driving car with sensors in Gazebo


In this section, we are going to discuss an open-source self-driving car project done in Gazebo. In this project, we will learn how to implement a robot car model in Gazebo and how to integrate all sensors into it. Also, we will move the robot around the environment using a keyboard, and finally, we will build a map of the environment using SLAM.

Installing prerequisites

This project is fully compatible with ROS Indigo, but some packages are yet to be released in ROS Kinetic. Let's take a look at the prerequisites for setting up packages in ROS Indigo.

The commands given here will install the ROS Gazebo controller manager:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-controller-manager$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-ros-control ros-indigo-ros-controllers$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-control

After installing this, we can install the Velodyne simulator packages in Indigo using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne...