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

Important troubleshooting tips in ROS


We will look at some of the common issues when working with ROS as well as tips to solve them.

One of the ROS inbuilt tools to find issues in a ROS system is roswtf. roswtf, which checks issues in following areas of ROS:

  • Environment variables and configuration issues

  • It can scan a package or meta-package to report potential issues

  • It can check a launch file for its potential issues

  • It can check system issues and online graph issues

  • It can report warnings and errors—warnings can be avoided but are not necessary, errors should be addressed

Usage of roswtf

We can check the issues inside a ROS package by simply entering the package and entering roswtf. We can also check issues in the launch file using the following command:

$ roswtf <file_name>.launch

We may get a report if there are issues associated with the package.

Figure 16: roswtf command output for a ROS package

The wiki page of roswtf is available at http://wiki.ros.org/roswtf.

The following are some...