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 robot model for the differential drive mobile robot

A differential wheeled robot will have two wheels connected to opposite sides of the robot chassis, which is supported by one or two caster wheels. The wheels will control the speed of the robot by regulating the velocity of the single wheels. If the two motors are running at the same speed, the wheels will move forward or backward. If one wheel is running slower than the other, the robot will turn to the side of the lower speed. If we want to turn the robot to the left side, we reduce the velocity of the left wheel and vice versa.

There are two supporting wheels, called caster wheels, that will support the robot and rotate freely based on the movement of the main wheels.

The URDF model of this robot is present in the cloned ROS package. The final robot model is shown here:

Figure 3.12 – The differential drive mobile robot

The preceding robot has five joints and links. The two main...