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

Creating the COLLADA file of a robot to work with OpenRave


In this section, we can discuss how to convert the robot URDF model to the collada file (.dae) format to work with OpenRave. There is a ROS package called collada_urdf, which contains nodes to convert URDF into collada files. The URDF file of ABB-IRB 6640 model is on abb_irb6600_support/urdf folder named irb6640.urdf. Copy this file into your working folder and run the following command for the conversion:

Start roscore
$ roscore

Run the conversion command. We need to mention the URDF file and the output DAE file:

$ rosrun collada_urdf urdf_to_collada irb6640.urdf irb6640.dae

Tip

In most of the cases, this command fails because most of the URDF file contains STL meshes and it may not convert into DAE as we expected. If the robot meshes in, in DAE format, it will work fine. If it happens, follow this procedure:

  • Install Meshlab tool for viewing and editing meshes using the following command:

  • Open meshes present at abb_irb6600_support...