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

Understanding DYNAMIXEL ROS Servo controllers for robot hardware interfacing


Till now, we have learned about MoveIt! interfacing using Gazebo simulation. In this section, we will see how to replace Gazebo and put a real robot interface to MoveIt!. Let's discuss the DYNAMIXEL servos and the ROS controllers.

The DYNAMIXEL servos

The DYNAMIXEL servos are smart, high-performance networked actuators for high-end robotics applications. These servos are manufactured by a Korean company called ROBOTIS (http://en.robotis.com/). These servos are very popular among robotics enthusiasts because they can provide excellent position and torque control, and also provide a variety of feedback, such as position, speed, temperature, voltage, and so on. One of their useful features is that they can be networked in a daisy chain manner. This feature is very useful in multi-joint systems, such as a robotic arm, humanoid robots, robotic snakes, and others. The servos can be directly connected to PCs using a USB...