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 Dynamixel with ROS


If you successfully configured the Dynamixel servo, then it will be very easy to interface Dynamixel with ROS running on Ubuntu. As we've already discussed, there is no need of an FTDI driver in Ubuntu because it's already built into the kernel. The only thing we have to do is install the ROS Dynamixel driver packages.

The ROS Dynamixel packages are available at the following link:

http://wiki.ros.org/dynamixel_motor

You can install the Dynamixel ROS packages using commands we'll look at now.

Installing the ROS dynamixel_motor packages

The ROS dynamixel_motor package stack is a dependency for the face tracker project, so we can install it to the ros_project_dependencies_ws ROS workspace.

Open a Terminal and switch to the src folder of the workspace:

$ cd ~/ros_project_dependencies_ws/src

Clone the latest Dynamixel driver packages from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/arebgun/dynamixel_motor

Remember to do a catkin_make to build the entire packages of the Dynamixel...