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 Hokuyo Laser in ROS


We can interface different ranges of laser scanners in ROS. One of the popular laser scanners available in the market is Hokuyo Laser scanner (http://www.robotshop.com/en/hokuyo-utm-03lx-laser-scanning-rangefinder.html):

Figure 14: Different series of Hokuyo laser scanners

One of the commonly used Hokuyo laser scanner models is UTM-30LX. This sensor is fast and accurate and is suitable for robotic applications. The device has a USB 2.0 interface for communication, and has up to a 30 meters range with a millimeter resolution. The arc range of the scan is about 270 degrees:

Figure 15: Hokuyo UTM-30LX

There is already a driver available in ROS for interfacing these scanners. One of the interfaces is called urg_node (http://wiki.ros.org/urg_node).

We can install this package by using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-urg-node

When the device connects to the Ubuntu system, it will create a device called ttyACMx. Check the device name by entering...