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

Performing visual odometry with an RGBD camera


Now we are going to see how to perform visual odometry using RGBD cameras using fovis.

Installing fovis

Since fovis is not provided as a Debian package, you must build it in your catkin workspace (use the same workspace as you used for chapter5_tutorials). Proceed with the following commands within any workspace:

$ cdsrc$ git clone https://github.com/srv/libfovis.git$ git clone https://github.com/srv/fovis.git$ cd ..$ catkin_make

This clones two repositories that allow us to have the fovis software integrated in ROS. Note that the original code is hosted on this Google Code Project at http://fovis.github.io/.

Once this has been built successfully, set up the environment for this workspace before using the software:

$ sourcedevel/setup.bash

Using fovis with the Kinect RGBD camera

At this point, we are going to run fovis for the Kinect RGBD camera. This means that we are going to have 3D information to compute the visual odometry, so better results are...