Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS Robotics Application Development, is for absolute beginners to ROS. No need to worry if you don’t have experience in ROS; this chapter will help you get an idea of the ROS software framework and its concepts.

Chapter 2, Face Detection and Tracking Using ROS, OpenCV and Dynamixel Servos, takes you through a cool project that you can make with ROS and the OpenCV library. This project basically creates a face tracker application in which your face will be tracked in such a way that the camera will always point to your face. We will use intelligent servos such as Dynamixel to rotate the robot on its axis.

Chapter 3, Building a Siri-Like Chatbot in ROS, is for those of you who want to make your robot interactive and intelligent without much hassle. This project creates a chatterbot in ROS that you can communicate with using text or speech. This project will be useful if you're going to create social or service robots.

Chapter 4, Controlling Embedded Boards Using ROS, helps you build a robot using Arduino, an embedded compatible board, Raspberry Pi, or Odroid and an interface to ROS. In this chapter, you will see a wide variety of embedded boards and interfacing projects made with them.

Chapter 5, Teleoperate a Robot Using Hand Gestures, will teach you how to build a gesture-control device using Arduino and IMU. The gestures are translated into motion commands by ROS nodes.

Chapter 6, Object Detection and Recognition, has interesting project for detecting objects. You will learn both 2D and 3D object recognition using powerful ROS packages.

Chapter 7, Deep Learning Using ROS and TensorFlow, is a project made using a trending technology in robotics. Using the TensorFlow library and ROS, we can implement interesting deep-learning applications. You can implement image recognition using deep learning, and an application using SVM can be found in this chapter.

Chapter 8, ROS on MATLAB and Android, is intended for building robot applications using ROS, MATLAB, and Android.

Chapter 9, Building an Autonomous Mobile Robot, is about creating an autonomous mobile robot with the help of ROS. You can see how to use packages such as navigation, gmapping, and AMCL to make a mobile robot autonomous.

Chapter 10, Creating a Self-driving Car Using ROS, is one of the more interesting projects in this book. In this chapter, we will build a simulation of self-driving car using ROS and Gazebo.

Chapter 11, Teleoperating Robot Using VR Headset and Leap Motion, shows you how to control a robot's actions using a VR headset and Leap Motion sensor. You can play around with virtual reality, a trending technology these days.

Chapter 12, Controlling Your Robots over the Web, we will see how to build interactive web applications using rosbridge in ROS.

You should have a powerful PC running a Linux distribution, preferably Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

You can use a laptop or desktop with a graphics card, and RAM of 4-8 GB is preferred. This is actually for running high-end simulations in Gazebo, as well as for processing point clouds and computer vision.

You should have the sensors, actuators, and I/O boards mentioned in the book and should be able to connect them all to your PC.

You also need Git installed to clone the package files.

If you are a Windows user, then it will be good to download VirtualBox and set up Ubuntu on it. You can have issues when you try to interface real hardware to ROS when working with VirtualBox. So, it is best if you can work from a real Linux system.

If you are a robotics enthusiast or researcher who wants to learn more about building robot applications using ROS, this book is for you. In order to learn from this book, you should have a basic knowledge of ROS, GNU/Linux, and C++ programming concepts. The book is also good for programmers who want to explore the advanced features of ROS.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The next lines of code read the link and assign it to the to the BeautifulSoup function."

A block of code is set as follows:

    ros::init(argc, argv,"face_tracker_controller");
    ros::NodeHandle node_obj;
    ros::Subscriber number_subscriber =   
    node_obj.subscribe("/face_centroid",10,face_callback);
    dynamixel_control = node_obj.advertise<std_msgs::Float64> 
    ("/pan_controller/command",10);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    ros::init(argc, argv,"face_tracker_controller");
    ros::NodeHandle node_obj;
    ros::Subscriber number_subscriber = 
    node_obj.subscribe("/face_centroid",10,face_callback);
    dynamixel_control = node_obj.advertise<std_msgs::Float64>  
    ("/pan_controller/command",10);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/qboticslabs/ros_robotics_projects

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In order to download new modules, we will go to Files | Settings | Project Name | Project Interpreter."

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