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

Sending goals


We are sure that you have been playing with the robot by moving it around the map a lot. This is funny but a little tedious and it is not very functional.

Perhaps you were thinking that it would be a great idea to program a list of movements and send the robot to different positions with only a button, even when we are not in front of a computer with rviz.

Okay, now you are going to learn how to do it using actionlib.

The actionlib package provides a standardized interface for interfacing with tasks. For example, you can use it to send goals for the robot to detect something in a place, make scans with the laser, and so on. In this section, we will send a goal to the robot and we will wait for this task to end.

It could look similar to services, but if you are doing a task that has a long duration, you might want the ability to cancel the request during the execution or get periodic feedback about how the request is progressing, and you cannot do it with services. Furthermore,...