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 Arduino to add sensors and actuators


Arduino is an open source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

The following image shows how an Arduino board looks:

ROS can use this type of device with the rosserial package. Basically, Arduino is connected to the computer using a serial connection, and data is transmitted using this port. With rosserial, you can also use a lot of devices controlled by a serial connection, for example, GPS and servo controllers.

First, we need to install the packages. To do this, we use the following command lines:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinect-rosserial-arduino$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinect-rosserial

Then, for the catkin workspace, we need to clone the rosserial repository into the workspace. The rosserial messages are created, and ros_lib is compiled with the following command lines:

$ cd dev...