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 a DBW car with ROS


In this section, we will see how to interface a real car with ROS and make it autonomous. As we discussed earlier, the DBW interface enables us to control a vehicle's throttle, brake, and steering using the CAN protocol.

There's an existing open source project that is doing this job. The project is owned by a company called Dataspeed Inc. (http://dataspeedinc.com/). Here is the list of projects related to self-driving cars from Dataspeed:

https://bitbucket.org/DataspeedInc/

We are going to discuss Dataspeed's ADAS vehicle development project.

First, we will see how to install the ROS packages of this project and look at the functionality of each package and node.

Installing packages

Here are the complete instructions to install these packages. We only need a single command to install all these packages.

We can install this on ROS Indigo and ROS Kinetic using the following command:

bash <(wget -q -O - https://bitbucket.org/DataspeedInc/dbw_mkz_ros/raw/default/dbw_mkz...