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

Understanding ROS – OpenCV interfacing packages


OpenCV is one of the popular open source real time computer vision libraries, which is mainly written in C/C++. OpenCV comes with a BSD license and is free for academic and commercial application. OpenCV can be programmed using C/C++, Python, and Java, and it has multi-platform support such as Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, and iOS. OpenCV has tons of computer vision APIs, which can be used for implementing computer vision applications. The web page of OpenCV library is http://opencv.org/.

The OpenCV library is interfaced to ROS via ROS stack called vision_opencv. vision_opencv consists of two important packages for interfacing OpenCV to ROS. They are:

  • cv_bridge: The cv_bridge package contains a library that provides APIs for converting the OpenCV image data type cv::Mat to the ROS image message called sensor_msgs/Image and vice versa. In short, it can act as a bridge between OpenCV and ROS. We can use OpenCV APIs to process the image and convert...