Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández
Book Image

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández

Overview of this book

<p>Both the amateur and the professional roboticist who has ever tried their hand at robotics programming will have faced with the cumbersome task of starting from scratch, usually reinventing the wheel. ROS comes with a great number of already working functionalities, and this book takes you from the first steps to the most elaborate designs possible within this software framework.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" is full of practical examples that will help you to understand the framework from the very beginning. Build your own robot applications in a simulated environment and share your knowledge with the large community supporting ROS.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" starts with the basic concepts and usage of ROS in a very straightforward and practical manner. It is a painless introduction to the fascinating world of robotics, covering sensor integration, modeling, simulation, computer vision, and navigation algorithms, among other topics.</p> <p>After the first two chapters, concepts like topics, messages, and nodes will become daily bread. Make your robot see with HD cameras, or navigate avoiding obstacles with range sensors. Furthermore, thanks to the contributions of the vast ROS community, your robot will be able to navigate autonomously, and even recognize and interact with you, in a matter of minutes.</p> <p>"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" will give you all the background you need to know in order to start in the fascinating world of robotics and program your own robot. Simply, you put the limit!</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Debugging ROS nodes


In order to detect problems in the algorithms implemented inside ROS nodes, we can face the problem at different levels to make the debugging of the software easier. First, we must provide some readable information about the progress of the algorithm, driver, or another piece of software. In ROS, we have a set of logging macros for this particular purpose, which are completely integrated with the whole system. Second, we need tools to determine which verbosity level is desired for a given node; this is related to the ability to configure different logging levels. In the case of ROS, we will see how it is possible to set debugging/logging levels even on the fly as well as conditions and names for particular messages. Third, we must be able to use a debugger to step over the source code. We will see that the widely known GDB debugger integrates seamlessly with ROS nodes. Finally, at the abstraction (or semantic) level of ROS nodes and topics, it is useful to inspect the...