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

Getting started with Android and its ROS interface


There exists a cool interface between ROS and Android. As you know, Android is one of most popular operating systems in mobile devices. Just imagine: if we can access all features of a mobile devices on the ROS network, we can build robots using it, right? We can build Android apps with ROS capabilities and can make any kind of robot using it, its scope is unlimited.

The following shows how the communication between android device and ROS robot is happening. The figure shows an example Android-ROS application which can teleoperate robot from an android device. Each android application should inherit from RosActivity which is getting from Android-ROS interface, then only we can access ROS API's in our application. We can see more about the API's after this section.

Figure 22: Android - ROS teleop interface

The core backend of the Android ROS library is RosJava (http://wiki.ros.org/rosjava), which is an implementation of ROS in Java. There is...