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

Interfacing Velodyne LIDAR in ROS


One of the trending areas in robotics is autonomous cars or driverless cars. One of the essential ingredients in this robot is a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). One of the commonly used LIDARs is Velodyne LIDAR. Velodyne LIDARs are used in Google driverless cars and also in most of the research in driver less cars. There are three models of Velodyne LIDAR available in the market. Following are the three models and their diagrams:

Velodyne HDL-64E, Velodyne HDL-32E, and Velodyne VLP-16/Puck.

Figure 17: Different series of Velodyne

Velodyne can interface to ROS and can generate point cloud data from its raw data. The link for the velodyne ROS package for model HDL-32E is http://wiki.ros.org/velodyne.

We can install the velodyne driver in Ubuntu using the following command:

  • In Jade:
$ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-velodyne
  • In Indigo:
$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne

After installing these packages, connect the LIDAR power supply and connect Ethernet cable...