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

Performing visual odometry with an RGBD camera


Now we are going to see how to perform visual odometry using RGBD cameras using fovis.

Installing fovis

Since fovis is not provided as a Debian package, you must build it in your catkin workspace (use the same workspace as you used for chapter5_tutorials). Proceed with the following commands within any workspace:

$ cdsrc
$ git clone https://github.com/srv/libfovis.git
$ git clone https://github.com/srv/fovis.git
$ cd ..
$ catkin_make

This clones two repositories that allow us to have the fovis software integrated in ROS. Note that the original code is hosted on this Google Code Project at http://fovis.github.io/.

Once this has been built successfully, set up the environment for this workspace before using the software:

$ sourcedevel/setup.bash

Using fovis with the Kinect RGBD camera

At this point, we are going to run fovis for the Kinect RGBD camera. This means that we are going to have 3D information to compute the visual odometry, so better results...