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

Motion planning with collisions


It might be interesting for the reader to know that MoveIt! provides motion planning with collisions out of the box, so in this section we will cover how you can add elements to the planning scene that could potentially collide with our robotic arm. First, we will start by explaining how to add basic objects to the planning scene, which is quite interesting as it allows us to perform planning even if a real object doesn't exist in our scene. For completion, we will also explain how to remove those objects from the scene. Finally, we will explain how to add an RGBD sensor feed, which will produce point clouds based on real-life (or simulated) objects, thus making our motion planning much more interesting and realistic.

Adding objects to the planning scene

To start adding an object, we need to have a planning scene; this is only possible when MoveIt! is running, so the first step is to start Gazebo, MoveIt!, the controllers, and RViz. Since the planning scene...