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

Working with point cloud data


We can handle the point cloud data from Kinect or the other 3D sensors for performing wide variety of tasks such as 3D object detection and recognition, obstacle avoidance, 3D modeling, and so on. In this section, we will see some basic functionalities using the PCL library and its ROS interface. We will discuss the following examples:

  • How to publish a point cloud in ROS

  • How to subscribe and process point cloud

  • How to write point cloud data to a PCD file

  • How to read and publish point cloud from a PCD file

How to publish a point cloud

In this example, we will see how to publish a point cloud data using the sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 message. The code will use PCL APIs for handling and creating the point cloud, and converting the PCL cloud data to PointCloud2 message type. You will get the example code pcl_publisher.cpp from the chapter_8_codes/pcl_ros_tutorial/src folder.

#include <ros/ros.h>

// point cloud headers
#include <pcl/point_cloud.h>
//Header which...