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

Creating our first URDF file

The robot that we are going to build in the following sections is a mobile robot with four wheels and an arm with a gripper.

To start with, we create the base of the robot with four wheels. Create a new file in the chapter4_tutorials/robot1_description/urdf folder with the name robot1.urdf, and enter the following code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<robot name="Robot1">
  <link name="base_link">
    <visual>
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.2 .3 .1" />
      </geometry>
      <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="0 0 0.05" />
      <material name="white">
        <color rgba="1 1 1 1" />
      </material>
    </visual>
  </link>
  <link name="wheel_1">
    <visual>
      <geometry>
        <cylinder length="0.05" radius="0.05" />
      </geometry>
      <origin...