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

Controlling a ROS robot from MATLAB


Here is an interesting MATLAB GUI application that uses ROS APIs to remotely control a robot. The final application will look like the following:

Figure 13: MATLAB-ROS application GUI

In this application, we can put in the ROS master IP, port, and the teleop topic of the robot in its GUI itself. When we press the connect button, the MATLAB application will connect to the ROS network. Now, we can move the robot by pressing the Forward, Backward, Left, and Right buttons.

Here is the design block diagram of this application:

Figure 14: MATLAB-ROS application design block diagram

So let's look at how we can build an application like this.

Here are some of the frequently asking questions in ROS-MATLAB interface

  1. How to run multiple ROS nodes in MATLAB?

Yes, we can run multiple ROS nodes in MATLAB. The following command in MATLAB will give you an example to do it.

>>>openExample('robotics/RunMultipleROSNodesToPerformDifferentTasksExample')
  1. Does MATLAB support...