Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, Third edition - Third Edition

By : Lentin Joseph, Jonathan Cacace
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, Third edition - Third Edition

By: Lentin Joseph, Jonathan Cacace

Overview of this book

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a software framework used for programming complex robots. ROS enables you to develop software for building complex robots without writing code from scratch, saving valuable development time. Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming provides complete coverage of the advanced concepts using easy-to-understand, practical examples and step-by-step explanations of essential concepts that you can apply to your ROS robotics projects. The book begins by helping you get to grips with the basic concepts necessary for programming robots with ROS. You'll then discover how to develop a robot simulation, as well as an actual robot, and understand how to apply high-level capabilities such as navigation and manipulation from scratch. As you advance, you'll learn how to create ROS controllers and plugins and explore ROS's industrial applications and how it interacts with aerial robots. Finally, you'll discover best practices and methods for working with ROS efficiently. By the end of this ROS book, you'll have learned how to create various applications in ROS and build your first ROS robot.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1 – ROS Programming Essentials
4
Section 2 – ROS Robot Simulation
11
Section 3 – ROS Robot Hardware Prototyping
15
Section 4 – Advanced ROS Programming

PC/autopilot communication

To send and receive information from the aerial platform (simulated or real), we can use the following two modes:

  • Ground station: High-level software that can be connected to the autopilot to send commands such as take off and land or relay waypoint navigation information.
  • API: Programming an API allows developers to manage the behavior of the robot.

In both cases, the communication is managed by the MAVLink protocol. Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink)and is a protocol for communicating with small, unmanned vehicles. It is designed as a header-only message-marshaling library. It is used mostly for communication between a Ground Control Station (GCS) and unmanned vehicles, and in the intercommunication of the subsystem of the vehicle. A packet datagram example is shown in the following figure:

Figure 8.6 – MAVLink protocol

Messages are no more than 263 bytes. The sender always fills in the System ID and Component...