Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By: Jonathan Cacace, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

In this day and age, robotics has been gaining a lot of traction in various industries where consistency and perfection matter. Automation is achieved via robotic applications and various platforms that support robotics. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book focuses on the most stable release of ROS (Kinetic Kame), discusses advanced concepts, and effectively teaches you programming using ROS. We begin with aninformative overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS works. During the course of this book, you’ll learn to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt! motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. Learn to leverage several ROS packages to embrace your robot models. After covering robot manipulation and navigation, you’ll get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. Vision sensors are a key component of robots, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor and image elaboration, its interface in ROS and programming. You’ll also understand the hardware interface and simulation of complex robots to ROS and ROS Industrial. At the end of this book, you’ll discover the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
www.PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Interfacing USB webcams in ROS


We can start interfacing with an ordinary webcam or a laptop cam in ROS. Overall, there are no ROS-specific packages to install and use web cameras. If the camera is working in Ubuntu/Linux, it may be supported by the ROS driver too. After plugging in the camera, check whether a /dev/videoX device file has been created, or check with some application such as Cheese, VLC, or similar others. The guide to check whether the webcam is supported on Ubuntu is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam.

We can find the video devices present on the system using the following command:

$ ls /dev/ | grep video

If you get an output of video, you can confirm a USB cam is available for use.

After ensuring the webcam support in Ubuntu, we can install a ROS webcam driver called usb_cam using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-usb-cam

We can install the latest package of usb_cam from the source code. The driver is available on GitHub, at https://github...