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

Using the rqt_gui and rqt plugins


Since ROS Fuerte, the rx applications or tools have been deprecated, so we should use the rqt nodes instead. They are basically the same, and only a few of them incorporate small updates, bug fixes, and new features. The following table shows the equivalences for the tools shown in this chapter (the ROS Kinetic rqt tool and the one it replaces from previous ROS distributions):

ROS Kinetic rqt tool

Replaces (ROS Fuerte or before)

rqt_console and rqt_logger_level

rxconsole

rqt_graph

rxgraph

rqt_reconfigurerqt_reconfigure

dynamic_reconfigurereconfigure_gui

rqt_plot

rxplot

rqt_image_view

image_view

rqt_bag

rxbag

 

In ROS Kinetic, there are even more standalone plugins, such as a shell (rqt_shell), a topic publisher (rqt_publisher), a message type viewer (rqt_msg), and many more (the most important ones have been covered in this chapter). Even rqt_viz is a plugin, which replaces rviz, which can also be integrated into the new rqt_gui interface. We can run this GUI and add and...