Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example

Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example

Overview of this book

The visionaries who created ROS developed a framework for robotics centered on the commonality of robotic systems and exploited this commonality in ROS to expedite the development of future robotic systems. From the fundamental concepts to advanced practical experience, this book will provide you with an incremental knowledge of the ROS framework, the backbone of the robotics evolution. ROS standardizes many layers of robotics functionality from low-level device drivers to process control to message passing to software package management. This book provides step-by-step examples of mobile, armed, and flying robots, describing the ROS implementation as the basic model for other robots of these types. By controlling these robots, whether in simulation or in reality, you will use ROS to drive, move, and fly robots using ROS control.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ROS Robotics By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating and building a ROS package


Before we begin to design and build our robot model in simulation, we should create our first ROS package. In Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS, we created a ROS catkin workspace under /home/<username>/catkin_ws. The structure of a catkin workspace looks like this:

catkin_ws/                     -- WORKSPACE
   build/                          -- BUILD SPACE
   devel/                          -- DEVEL SPACE
   src/                               -- SOURCE SPACE
   CMakeLists.txt          -- 'Toplevel' CMake file, provided by catkin

Tip

Make sure that you have source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash in your .bashrc file, or this command is entered at the terminal window prompt.

We begin by moving to your catkin workspace source directory:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src

Now, let's create our first ROS package, ros_robotics:

$ catkin_create_pkg ros_robotics

This command will create a /ros_robotics directory under the ~/catkin_ws/src directory. The /ros_robotics directory...