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

Chapter 3. Visualization and Debugging Tools

ROS has a good number of tools which allow the user and the developer to visualize and debug their code in order to detect and solve issues with both hardware and software. This comprises a message logging system similar to log4cxx, diagnostic messages, and also visualization and inspection tools, which provide a comprehensive list of the running nodes as well as how are they interconnected.

In this chapter, we will also show you how to debug an ROS node with the GDB debugger. The message logging API will be explained, and advice will be given on how to choose the logging level. Then, we will explain the set of ROS tools that allows us to inspect which processes are running and what information is communicated between them. For instance, the following figure shows a tool that visualizes the graph of the system, where the nodes are the processes running and the edges represent the data workflow through communication topics. This tool is rqt_graph...