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 – PCL interfacing packages


The point cloud data can be defined as a group of data points in some coordinate system. In 3D, it has X, Y, and Z coordinates. PCL library is an open source project for handling 2D/3D image and point clouds processing.

Like OpenCV, it is under BSD license and free for academic and commercial purposes. It is also a cross platform, which has support in Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and Android/iOS.

The library consists of standard algorithms for filtering, segmentation, feature estimation, and so on, which is required to implement different point cloud applications. The main web page of point cloud library is http://pointclouds.org/.

The point cloud data can be acquired by sensors such as Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel Real Sense, and such others. We can use this data for robotic applications such as robot object manipulation and grasping. PCL is tightly integrated into ROS for handling point cloud data from various sensors. The perception_pcl stack is the...