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

Simulation in ROS


In order to make simulations with our robots in ROS, we are going to use Gazebo.

Gazebo (http://Gazebosim.org/) is a multi-robot simulator for complex indoor and outdoor environments. It is capable of simulating a population of robots, sensors, and objects in a three-dimensional world. It generates both realistic sensor feedback and physically plausible interactions between objects.

Gazebo is now independent from ROS and is installed as a standalone package in Ubuntu. In this section, we will learn how to interface Gazebo and ROS. You will learn how to use the model created before, how to include a laser sensor and a camera, and how to move it as a real robot.

Using our URDF 3D model in Gazebo

We are going to use the model that we designed in the last section, but to make it simple, we won't include the arm.

Make sure that you have Gazebo installed by typing the following command in a terminal:

$ gazebo

Before starting to work with Gazebo, we will install ROS packages to interface...