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

Introduction to Chefbot- a DIY mobile robot and its hardware configuration


In Chapter 4, Using the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation Stack we have discussed some mandatory requirements for interfacing a mobile robot with ROS navigation package. The following are the mandatory requirements:

  • Odometry source: Robot should publish its odometry/position data with respect to the starting position. The necessary hardware components that provide odometry information are wheel encoders, IMU, and 2D/3D cameras (visual odometry).

  • Sensor source: There should be a laser scanner or a 3D vision sensor sensor, which can act as a laser scanner. The laser scanner data is essential for map building process using SLAM.

  • Sensor transform using tf: The robot should publish the transform of the sensors and other robot components using ROS transform.

  • Base controller: The base controller is a ROS node, which can convert a twist message from Navigation stack to corresponding motor velocities.

    Figure 1: Chefbot prototype

We...