Book Image

Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition

By : Anil Mahtani, Luis Sánchez, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo
Book Image

Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition

By: Anil Mahtani, Luis Sánchez, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo

Overview of this book

Building and programming a robot can be cumbersome and time-consuming, but not when you have the right collection of tools, libraries, and more importantly expert collaboration. ROS enables collaborative software development and offers an unmatched simulated environment that simplifies the entire robot building process. This book is packed with hands-on examples that will help you program your robot and give you complete solutions using open source ROS libraries and tools. It also shows you how to use virtual machines and Docker containers to simplify the installation of Ubuntu and the ROS framework, so you can start working in an isolated and control environment without changing your regular computer setup. It starts with the installation and basic concepts, then continues with more complex modules available in ROS such as sensors and actuators integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, Computer Vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to leverage all the ROS Kinetic features to build a fully fledged robot for all your needs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Effective Robotics Programming with ROS Third Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Dealing with the unexpected


ROS has several tools for detecting potential problems in all the elements of a given package. Just move with roscd to the package you want to analyze. Then, run roswtf. For chapter3_tutorials, we have the following output. Note that if you have something running, the ROS graph will be analyzed too. We have run the roslaunch chapter3_tutorials example6.launch command, which yields an output similar to the following screenshot:

In general, we should expect no error or warning, but even then some of them are innocuous. In the previous screenshot, we can see that roswtf does not detect any error; it only issues a warning about pip, which may sometimes generate problems with the Python code installed in the system. Note that the purpose of roswtf is to signal potential problems; we are responsible for checking whether they are real or meaningless ones, as in the previous case.

Another useful tool is catkin_lint, which helps to diagnose errors with catkin, usually in...