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

Debugging ROS nodes


ROS nodes can be debugged as regular programs. They run as a process in the operating system and have a PID. Therefore, you can debug them as with any program using standard tools, such as gdb. Similarly, you can check for memory leaks with memcheck or profile the performance of your algorithm with callgrind. However, remember that in order to run a node, you must run the following command:

$ rosrun chapter3_tutorials example1

Unfortunately, you cannot simply run the command through gdb in the following way:

$ gdb rosrun chapter3_tutorials example1

In the following sections, we will explain how to call these tools for an ROS node to overcome this issue. Later, we will see how to add logging messages to our code in order to make it simple to diagnose problems; in practice, using logging messages helps to diagnose basic (and not so basic) problems without the need to debug the binaries. Similarly, we will discuss ROS introspection tools, which allow you to easily detect...