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

Interfacing Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro in ROS


The web cams that we have worked with till now can only provide 2D visual information of the surroundings. For getting 3D information about the surroundings, we have to use 3D vision sensors or range finders such as laser finders. Some of the 3D vision sensors that we are discussing in this chapter are Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel Real sense, Velodyne, and Hokuyo laser scanner.

Figure 7 : Top: Kinect , Bottom: Asus Xtion Pro

The first two sensors we are going to discuss are Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro. Both of these devices need OpenNI (Open source Natural Interaction) driver library for operating in Linux system. OpenNI acts as a middleware between the 3D vision devices and the application software. The OpenNI driver is integrated to ROS and we can install these drivers using the following commands. These packages help to interface the OpenNI complaint device, such as Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro.

  • In Jade:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-openni-launch...