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

Simulating the robotic arm using Gazebo and ROS


In the previous chapter, we designed a seven DOF arm. In this section, we will simulate the robot in Gazebo using ROS.

Before starting with Gazebo and ROS, we should install the following packages to work with Gazebo and ROS.

  • In ROS Jade:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-jade-gazebo-ros ros-jade-gazebo-msgs ros-jade-gazebo-plugins
    
  • In ROS Indigo:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-indigo-gazebo-msgs ros-indigo-gazebo-plugins ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-control
    

The use of each package is as follows:

  • gazebo_ros_pkgs: This contains wrappers and tools for interfacing ROS with Gazebo

  • gazebo-msgs: This contains messages and service data structures for interfacing with Gazebo from ROS

  • gazebo-plugins: This contains Gazebo plugins for sensors, actuators, and so on.

  • gazebo-ros-control: This contains standard controllers to communicate between ROS and Gazebo

After installation, check whether the Gazebo is properly installed...