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 robot joints from a web browser


This is the second project we are going discuss in this chapter. The aim of this project is to control robot joints from the web browser itself.

Here is the block diagram of the working of a joint state publisher from the web browser:

Figure 6: Block diagram of web-based joint state controller

From the block diagram, we can see that we are using another JavaScript module called jointstatepublisherjs. This module has a class to create a joint state publisher for all joints defined inside the URDF file.

Installing joint_state_publisher_js

To use this joint state control module, we need to clone the following package into the ROS catkin workspace. Here is the command:

$ git clone https://github.com/DLu/joint_state_publisher_js

You can use catkin_make after executing the preceding command.

You can see the JavaScript module from the joint_state_publisher_js/build folder. You can copy this module and use it for your own applications.

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