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

Creating a ROS package

ROS packages are the basic units of ROS programs. We can create a ROS package, build it, and release it to the public. The current distribution of ROS we are using is Noetic Ninjemys. We are using the catkin build system to build ROS packages. A build system is responsible for generating targets (executable/libraries) from textual source code that can be used by end users. In older distributions, such as Electric and Fuerte, rosbuild was the build system. Because of the various flaws of rosbuild, catkin came into existence. This also allowed us to move the ROS compilation system closer to Cross Platform Make (CMake). This has a lot of advantages, such as porting the package to another OS, such as Windows. If an OS supports CMake and Python, catkin-based packages can be ported to it.

The first requirement for working with ROS packages is to create a ROS catkin workspace. After installing ROS, we can create and build a catkinworkspace called catkin_ws:

mkdir...