Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular robotics software frameworks in research and industry. It has various features for implementing different capabilities in a robot without implementing them from scratch. This book starts by showing you the fundamentals of ROS so you understand the basics of differential robots. Then, you'll learn about robot modeling and how to design and simulate it using ROS. Moving on, we'll design robot hardware and interfacing actuators. Then, you'll learn to configure and program depth sensors and LIDARs using ROS. Finally, you'll create a GUI for your robot using the Qt framework. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a clear idea of how to integrate and assemble everything into a robot and how to bundle the software package.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Interfacing Vision Sensors with ROS

In the previous chapter, we looked at actuators and how to interface the robot's sensors using the Tiva-C LaunchPad board. In this chapter, we will mainly look at vision sensors and the interface that they use with our robot.

The robot we are designing will have a 3D vision sensor, and we will be able to interface it with vision libraries such as Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV), Open Natural Interaction (OpenNI), and Point Cloud Library (PCL). The main application of the 3D vision sensor in our robot is autonomous navigation.

We will also look at how to interface the vision sensors with ROS and process the images that it senses using vision libraries such as OpenCV. In the last section of this chapter, we will look at the mapping and localization algorithm that we will use in our robot, called SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping...