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

The OpenRave and IKFast modules

OpenRave is a set of command lines and GUI tools for developing, testing, and deploying motion planning algorithms in real-world applications. One of the OpenRave modules is IKFast, which is a robot kinematics compiler. OpenRave was created by a robotic researcher called Rosen Diankov. The IKFast compiler analytically solves the inverse kinematics of a robot and generates optimized and independent C++ files, which can be deployed in our code for solving IK. The IKFast compiler generates analytic solutions of IK, which is much faster than numerical solutions provided by KDL. The IKFast compiler can handle any number of DOFs, but practically it is well suited for DOF <= 6. IKFast is a Python script that takes arguments such as IK types, robot model, the joint position of the base link, and end effectors.

The following are the main IK types supported by IKFast:

  • Transform 6D: This end effector should calculate the commanded 6D transformation...