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

The find_object_2d package in ROS


One of the advantages of ROS is that it has tons of packages that can be reused in our applications. In our case, what we want is to implement an object recognition and detection system. The find_object_2d package (http://wiki.ros.org/find_object_2d) implements SURF, SIFT, FAST, and BRIEF feature detectors (https://goo.gl/B8H9Zm) and descriptors for object detection. Using the GUI provided by this package, we can mark the objects we want to detect and save them for future detection. The detector node will detect the objects in camera images and publish the details of the object through a topic. Using a 3D sensor, it can estimate the depth and orientation of the object.

Installing find_object_2d

Installing this package is pretty easy. Here is the command to install it on Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-find-object-2d

Installing from source code

Switch into the ROS workspace:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src

Clone the source code into the src...