Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming. - Second Edition

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming. - Second Edition

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

In this day and age, robotics has been gaining a lot of traction in various industries where consistency and perfection matter. Automation is achieved via robotic applications and various platforms that support robotics. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book focuses on the most stable release of ROS (Kinetic Kame), discusses advanced concepts, and effectively teaches you programming using ROS. We begin with aninformative overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS works. During the course of this book, you’ll learn to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt! motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. Learn to leverage several ROS packages to embrace your robot models. After covering robot manipulation and navigation, you’ll get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. Vision sensors are a key component of robots, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor and image elaboration, its interface in ROS and programming. You’ll also understand the hardware interface and simulation of complex robots to ROS and ROS Industrial. At the end of this book, you’ll discover the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
www.PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Using the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation Stack

In the previous chapters, we have been discussing the design and simulation of a robotic arm and mobile robot. We controlled each joint of the robotic arm in Gazebo using the ROS controller and moved the mobile robot inside Gazebo using the teleop node.

In this chapter, we are going to address the motion planning problem. Moving a robot by directly controlling its joints manually might be a difficult task, especially if we want to add position or velocity constraints to the robot motion. Similarly, driving a mobile robot, avoiding obstacles, requires the planning of a path. For this reason, we will solve these problems using the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation stack.

MoveIt! is a set of packages and tools for doing mobile manipulation in ROS. The official web page (http://moveit.ros.org/) contains the documentations, the list of robots using MoveIt!, and various examples to demonstrate pick and place, grasping, simple motion planning using inverse...