Book Image

ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

By : Anil Mahtani, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo, Luis Sánchez, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

By: Anil Mahtani, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo, Luis Sánchez, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

This learning path is designed to help you program and build your robots using open source ROS libraries and tools. We start with the installation and basic concepts, then continue with the more complex modules available in ROS, such as sensor and actuator integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, computer vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. We then discuss advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. You'll get a deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. We'll go through great projects such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find beginner, intermediate, and expert ROS robotics applications inside! It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition ? Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming ? ROS Robotics Projects
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Preface
Bibliography
Index

Chapter 13. Writing ROS Controllers and Visualization Plugins

In the last chapter, we have discussed about pluginlib, nodelets, and Gazebo plugins. The base library for making plugins in ROS is pluginlib, and the same library can be used in nodelets and Gazebo plugins. In this chapter, we will continue with pluginlib-based concepts such as ROS controllers and RViz plugins. We have already worked with ROS controllers and have reused some standard controllers such as joint state, position, and trajectory controllers in Chapter 11, Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo.

In this chapter, we will see how to write a basic ROS controller for a PR2 robot (https://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview) and robots similar to PR2. After creating the controller, use the controller in PR2 simulation. The RViz plugins can add more functionality to RViz and in this chapter we can see how to create a basic RViz plugin. The detailed topics that we are going to discuss in this chapter are as follows:

  • Understanding...