Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects

Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System is one of the most widely used software frameworks for robotic research and for companies to model, simulate, and prototype robots. Applying your knowledge of ROS to actual robotics is much more difficult than people realize, but this title will give you what you need to create your own robotics in no time! This book is packed with over 14 ROS robotics projects that can be prototyped without requiring a lot of hardware. The book starts with an introduction of ROS and its installation procedure. After discussing the basics, you’ll be taken 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 ROS robotics applications for beginner, intermediate, and expert levels inside! This book will be the perfect companion for a robotics enthusiast who really wants to do something big in the field.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
ROS Robotics Projects
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Building a ROS-VR Android application


In this section, we will see how to create a virtual reality experience in ROS, especially in robotics simulators such as Gazebo. Luckily, we have an open source Android project called ROS Cardboard (https://github.com/cloudspace/ros_cardboard). This project is exactly what we want we want for this application. This application is based on ROS-Android APIs, which help us visualize compressed images from a ROS PC. It also does the splitting of the view for the left and right eye, and when we put this on a VR headset, it will feel like 3D.

Here is a figure that shows how this application works:

Figure 12: Communication between a ROS PC and Android phone

From the preceding figure, you can see that the image topic from Gazebo can be accessed from a ROS environment, and the compressed version of that image is sent to the ROS-VR app, which will split the view into left and right to provide 3D vision. Setting the ROS_IP variable on PC is important for the proper...