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

Loading the Baxter software


This section describes loading the software packages for the SDK, Baxter Simulator, and MoveIt. It is assumed that Ubuntu 14.04 and ROS Indigo software are installed on the computer to be used for the Baxter Simulator and software development. The steps for installing Ubuntu and ROS are described in Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS, in the Installing and launching ROS section.

Installing Baxter SDK software

The installation of Baxter Simulator requires that the SDK already be downloaded and installed into an ROS catkin workspace on the workstation computer. Instructions for the installation are presented here and can be found on the Rethink website at http://sdk.rethinkrobotics.com/wiki/Workstation_Setup.

In Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS, we created the catkin workspace catkin_ws and used this workspace in Chapter 2, Creating Your First Two-Wheeled ROS Robot (in Simulation) to create the ROS package ros_robotics. For the Baxter SDK packages, we will create...