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

Interfacing Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro with ROS

The webcams that we have worked with until now can only provide 2D visual information of their surroundings. To get 3D information about our surroundings, we must use 3D vision sensors or range finders, such as laser finders. Some of the 3D vision sensors that we will be discussing in this chapter are Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel RealSense, and Hokuyo laser scanner:

Figure 10.7 – Top: Kinect; bottom: Asus Xtion Pro

The first two sensors we are going to discuss are Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro. Both of these devices need the Open Source Natural Interaction (OpenNI) driver library to operate in Linux. OpenNI acts as a middleware between the 3D vision devices and the application software. The OpenNI driver is integrated into ROS, and we can install these drivers by using the following commands. These packages help us interface OpenNI-supported devices such as Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro:

sudo apt install...