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 Velodyne LIDAR in ROS


One of the trending areas in robotics is autonomous cars or driverless cars. One of the essential ingredients in this robot is a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). One of the commonly used LIDARs is Velodyne LIDAR. Velodyne LIDARs are used in Google driverless cars and also in most of the research in driver less cars. There are three models of Velodyne LIDAR available in the market. Following are the three models and their diagrams:

Velodyne HDL-64E, Velodyne HDL-32E, and Velodyne VLP-16/Puck.

Figure 17: Different series of Velodyne

Velodyne can interface to ROS and can generate point cloud data from its raw data. The link for the velodyne ROS package for model HDL-32E is http://wiki.ros.org/velodyne.

We can install the velodyne driver in Ubuntu using the following command:

  • In Jade:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-velodyne
    
  • In Indigo:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne
    

After installing these packages, connect the LIDAR power supply and connect Ethernet...