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

OpenCV in ROS


ROS provides a very simple integration with OpenCV, the most widely used open source Computer Vision library. However, it does not ship a specific Debian for ROS kinetic because that would force users to use a single version. Instead of that, it allows you to use the latest OpenCV library on the system and provides additional integration tools to use OpenCV in ROS. In the following sections we will explain how to install OpenCV and those additional tools.

Installing OpenCV 3.0

In ROS Kinetic we can start using OpenCV 3.0, in contrast to previous versions where some packages had some dependencies on OpenCV 2.* or compatibility issues with 3.0.

The installation follows the standard workflow of installing Ubuntu packages, so you only have to do the following:

$ sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev

Alternatively, you can also install an ROS package that installs the library too:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-opencv3

Using OpenCV in ROS

ROS uses the standalone OpenCV library installed...