Book Image

Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition

By : Sánchez, Fernandez Perdomo, Mahtani
Book Image

Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition

By: Sánchez, Fernandez Perdomo, Mahtani

Overview of this book

Building and programming a robot can be cumbersome and time-consuming, but not when you have the right collection of tools, libraries, and more importantly expert collaboration. ROS enables collaborative software development and offers an unmatched simulated environment that simplifies the entire robot building process. This book is packed with hands-on examples that will help you program your robot and give you complete solutions using open source ROS libraries and tools. It also shows you how to use virtual machines and Docker containers to simplify the installation of Ubuntu and the ROS framework, so you can start working in an isolated and control environment without changing your regular computer setup. It starts with the installation and basic concepts, then continues with more complex modules available in ROS such as sensors and actuators integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, Computer Vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to leverage all the ROS Kinetic features to build a fully fledged robot for all your needs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Understanding the ROS Filesystem level

The ROS Filesystem is one of the strangest concepts to grasp when starting to develop projects in ROS, but with time and patience, the reader will easily become familiar with it and realize its value for managing projects and its dependencies. The main goal of the ROS Filesystem is to centralize the build process of a project, while at the same time provide enough flexibility and tooling to decentralize its dependencies.

Understanding the ROS Filesystem level

Similar to an operating system, an ROS program is divided into folders, and these folders have files that describe their functionalities:

  • Packages: Packages form the atomic level of ROS. A package has the minimum structure and content to create a program within ROS. It may have ROS runtime processes (nodes), configuration files, and so on.
  • Package manifests: Package manifests provide information about a package, licenses, dependencies, compilation flags, and so on. A package manifest is managed with a file called package.xml.
  • Metapackages...