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

Installing the Leap Motion SDK on Ubuntu 14.04.5


In this project, we have chosen Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS and ROS Indigo because the Leap Motion SDK will smoothly work with this combination. The Leap Motion SDK is not fully supported by Ubuntu 16.04 LTS; if there are any further fixes from the company, this code will work on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with ROS Kinetic.

The Leap Motion SDK is the core of the Leap Motion controller. The Leap Motion controller has two IR cameras facing upwards and also has several IR projectors. This is interfaced with a PC, and the Leap SDK runs on the PC, which has drivers for the controller. It also has algorithms to process the hand image to produce the joint values of each finger joint.

Here is the procedure to install the Leap Motion SDK in Ubuntu:

  1. Download the SDK from https://www.leapmotion.com/setup/linux; you can extract this package and you will find two DEB files that can be installed on Ubuntu.
  1. Open Terminal on the extracted location and install the DEB file using...