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

ROS-Industrial robot driver package


In this section, we can discuss the industrial robot driver package. If we take the ABB robot as an example, it has a package called abb_driver. This package is responsible for communicating with the industrial robot controller. The package contains industrial robot clients and launches the file to start communicating with the controller.

We can check what's inside the abb_driver/launch folder. The following is a definition of a launch file called robot_interface.launch:

<launch>

  <!-- robot_ip: IP-address of the robot's socket-messaging server -->
  <arg name="robot_ip" />

  <!-- J23_coupled: set TRUE to apply correction for J2/J3 parallel linkage -->
  <arg name="J23_coupled" default="false" />

  <!-- copy the specified arguments to the Parameter Server, for use by nodes below -->
  <param name="robot_ip_address" type="str" value="$(arg robot_ip)"/>
  <param name="J23_coupled" type="bool" value="$(arg J23_coupled...