Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

The area of robotics is gaining huge momentum among corporate people, researchers, hobbyists, and students. The major challenge in robotics is its controlling software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book discusses the advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. It starts with deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. After discussing robot manipulation and navigation in robots, you will get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. One of the essential ingredients of robots are vision sensors, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor, its interfacing in ROS, and its programming. You will discuss the hardware interfacing and simulation of complex robot to ROS and ROS Industrial (Package used for interfacing industrial robots). Finally, you will get to know the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Interfacing seven DOF Dynamixel based robotic arm to ROS MoveIt!


In this section, we will discuss a 7 DOF robot manipulator called COOL arm-5000, which is manufactured by a company called ASIMOV Robotics (http://asimovrobotics.com/). The robot is built using Dynamixel servos (http://www.robotis.com/xe/dynamixel_en). We will see how to interface a Dynamixel-based robotic arm to ROS using dynamixel_controllers.

The following is a diagram of a COOL arm-5000:

Figure 15 : COOL Arm illustration.

COOL arm robots are fully compatible with ROS and MoveIt! and are mainly used in education and research. The price range is between 5K - 10K USD.

Following are the details of the arms:

  • Degree of Freedom: 7 DOF

  • Types of Actuators: Dynamixel MX-64 and MX-28

  • List of Joints: Shoulder Roll, Shoulder Pitch, Elbow Roll, Elbow Pitch, Wrist Yaw, Wrist Pitch, and Wrist Roll

  • Payload: 5K

  • Reach: 1 meter

  • Work Volume: 2.09 m3

  • Repeatability: +/- 0.05 mm

  • Gripper with 3 fingers

  • ROS support

Creating a controller package for COOL arm...