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 ROS web packages


ROS offers several powerful and very useful packages to communicate over the Web and interact with robots from web browsers . In the first section, we will discuss some of the open source modules and packages for building cool robot web applications.

The packages that we will discuss here are developed and maintained by the ROS web tools community (http://robotwebtools.org/). After discussing the basic web frameworks, we can start discussing projects that use it.

rosbridge_suite

If we want to interact with the ROS framework from our web browser, there should be some system that can convert the web browser commands to the ROS topics/services. rosbridge provides a JSON interface to ROS, allowing any client to send JSON commands (http://www.json.org/) to publish or subscribe to ROS topics, call ROS services, and more. rosbridge supports a variety of transport layers, including WebSockets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket) and TCP.

The rosbridge_suite...