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

Building a ROS-VR Android application


In this section, we will see how to create a virtual reality experience in ROS, especially in robotics simulators such as Gazebo. Luckily, we have an open source Android project called ROS Cardboard (https://github.com/cloudspace/ros_cardboard). This project is exactly what we want we want for this application. This application is based on ROS-Android APIs, which help us visualize compressed images from a ROS PC. It also does the splitting of the view for the left and right eye, and when we put this on a VR headset, it will feel like 3D.

Here is a figure that shows how this application works:

Figure 12: Communication between a ROS PC and Android phone

From the preceding figure, you can see that the image topic from Gazebo can be accessed from a ROS environment, and the compressed version of that image is sent to the ROS-VR app, which will split the view into left and right to provide 3D vision. Setting the ROS_IP variable on PC is important for the proper...