Book Image

Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Bernardo Ronquillo Japón
Book Image

Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Bernardo Ronquillo Japón

Overview of this book

Connecting a physical robot to a robot simulation using the Robot Operating System (ROS) infrastructure is one of the most common challenges faced by ROS engineers. With this book, you'll learn how to simulate a robot in a virtual environment and achieve desired behavior in equivalent real-world scenarios. This book starts with an introduction to GoPiGo3 and the sensors and actuators with which it is equipped. You'll then work with GoPiGo3's digital twin by creating a 3D model from scratch and running a simulation in ROS using Gazebo. Next, the book will show you how to use GoPiGo3 to build and run an autonomous mobile robot that is aware of its surroundings. Finally, you'll find out how a robot can learn tasks that have not been programmed in the code but are acquired by observing its environment. You'll even cover topics such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. By the end of this robot programming book, you'll be well-versed with the basics of building specific-purpose applications in robotics and developing highly intelligent autonomous robots from scratch.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Physical Robot Assembly and Testing
5
Section 2: Robot Simulation with Gazebo
8
Section 3: Autonomous Navigation Using SLAM
13
Section 4: Adaptive Robot Behavior Using Machine Learning

Setting up a physical robot

As mentioned in Chapter 3, Getting Started with ROS, we will now start working with a physical robot. Therefore, the first thing to do is to prepare the software you need to be running in the Raspberry Pi. This section will guide you through the process step by step.

Downloading and setting up Ubuntu Mate 18.04

Mate is, at the time of writing, the recommended Ubuntu desktop to run under Raspberry Pi. It is a complete Ubuntu distribution with a nice desktop interface. Follow these steps to make it run in your GoPiGo3:

  1. Download the image from https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/, selecting the Raspberry Pi version (recommended): AArch32 (ARMv7). Burn the image onto a micro SD card. Afterward, place...