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

Computing the homography of two images


The homography matrix is a 3 x 3 matrix that provides transformation up to scale from a given image and a new one, which must be coplanar. In src/homography.cpp, there is an extensive example that takes the first image acquired by the camera and then computes the homography for every new frame in respect to the first image. In order to run the example, take something planar, such as a book cover, and run the following command:

$ roslaunch chapter5_tutorials homography.launch

This runs the camera driver that should grab frames from your camera (webcam), detect features (SURF by default), extract descriptors for each of them, and match them with the ones extracted from the first image using Flann-based matching with a cross-check filter. Once the program has the matches, the homography matrix H is computed. With H, we can warp the new frame to obtain the original one, as shown in the following screenshot (matches on the top, warped image using H, which...