Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects

Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System is one of the most widely used software frameworks for robotic research and for companies to model, simulate, and prototype robots. Applying your knowledge of ROS to actual robotics is much more difficult than people realize, but this title will give you what you need to create your own robotics in no time! This book is packed with over 14 ROS robotics projects that can be prototyped without requiring a lot of hardware. The book starts with an introduction of ROS and its installation procedure. After discussing the basics, you’ll be taken through great projects, such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find ROS robotics applications for beginner, intermediate, and expert levels inside! This book will be the perfect companion for a robotics enthusiast who really wants to do something big in the field.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
ROS Robotics Projects
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Interfacing Velodyne sensors with ROS


We have seen how to simulate a Velodyne sensor; now let's have a look at how we can interface a real Velodyne sensor with ROS.

The following commands are to install the velodyne ROS driver package to convert Velodyne data to point cloud data.

ROS Kinetic:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-velodyne

ROS Indigo:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne

These commands will install the ROS Velodyne driver and point cloud converter packages.

This driver supports models such as the HDL-64E, HDL-32E, and VLP-16.

Here are the commands to start the driver nodelets:

$ roslaunch velodyne_driver nodelet_manager.launch model:=32E

Here, you need to mention the model name along with the launch file to start the driver for a specific model.

The following command will start the converter nodelets to convert Velodyne messages (velodyne_msgs/VelodyneScan) to a point cloud (sensor_msgs/PointCloud2). Here is the command to perform this conversion:

$ roslaunch velodyne_pointcloud...