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)

Conversion of point cloud data to laser scan data

We are using Astra in this robot to replicate the function of an expensive laser range scanner. The depth image is processed and converted to the data equivalent of a laser scanner using ROS's depthimage_to_laserscan package (see http://wiki.ros.org/depthimage_to_laserscan for more information).

You can either install this package from the source code or use the Ubuntu package manager. Here is the command to install this package from the Ubuntu package manager

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-<version>-depthimage-to-laserscan

The main function of this package is to slice a section of the depth image and convert it to an equivalent laser scan data type. The ROS sensor_msgs/LaserScan message type is used for publishing the laser scan data. This depthimage_to_laserscan package will perform this conversion and fake the laser...