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 15. Programming Vision Sensors using ROS, Open-CV, and PCL

In the last chapter, we discussed interfacing of sensors and actuators using I/O board in ROS. In this chapter, we are going to discuss how to interface various vision sensors in ROS and program it using libraries such as OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) and PCL (Point Cloud Library). The vision in a robot is an important aspect of the robot for manipulating object and navigation. There are lots of 2D/3D vision sensors available in the market and most of the sensors have an interface driver package in ROS. We will discuss interfacing of new vision sensors to ROS and programming it using OpenCV and PCL.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Understanding ROS-OpenCV interfacing packages
  • Understanding ROS-PCL interfacing packages
  • Installing OpenCV and PCL interfaces in ROS
  • Interfacing USB webcams in ROS
  • Working with ROS camera calibration
  • Converting images between ROS and OpenCV using cv_bridge
  • Displaying images from...