Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example

Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example

Overview of this book

The visionaries who created ROS developed a framework for robotics centered on the commonality of robotic systems and exploited this commonality in ROS to expedite the development of future robotic systems. From the fundamental concepts to advanced practical experience, this book will provide you with an incremental knowledge of the ROS framework, the backbone of the robotics evolution. ROS standardizes many layers of robotics functionality from low-level device drivers to process control to message passing to software package management. This book provides step-by-step examples of mobile, armed, and flying robots, describing the ROS implementation as the basic model for other robots of these types. By controlling these robots, whether in simulation or in reality, you will use ROS to drive, move, and fly robots using ROS control.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ROS Robotics By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


TurtleBot comes with its own 3D vision system that is a low-cost laser scanner. The Kinect, ASUS, or PrimeSense devices can be mounted on the TurtleBot base and provide a 3D depth view of the environment. This chapter provides a comparison of these three types of sensors and identifies the software that is needed to operate them as ROS components. We check their operation by testing the sensor on TurtleBot in standalone mode. To use the devices, we can utilize Image Viewer or rviz to view image streams from the rgb or depth cameras.

The primary objective is for TurtleBot to see its surroundings and be able to autonomously navigate through them. First, TurtleBot is driven around in teleoperation mode to create a map of the environment. The map provides the room boundaries and obstacles so that TurtleBot's navigation algorithm, amcl, can plan a path through the environment from its start location to a user-defined goal.

In the next chapter, we will return to the ROS simulation world...