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

Getting started with MATLAB and MATLAB-ROS


MATLAB (MATrix LABoratory) is a multi-platform numerical computing environment widely used by industries, universities, and research centers. MATLAB was born as a mathematical software, but now it offers a lot of additional packages for different areas, such as control design, plotting, image processing, robotics, and so on. MATLAB is a proprietary product of MathWorks and it's not a free software. Usually, free licenses are distributed for student and academic institutions. You can use MATLAB on Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. After you have launched it, the main window of MATLAB will appear with its default layout, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1: Main window of MATLAB in its default layout

This window includes three main panels:

  • Current Folder: This shows local files
  • Command Window: This is a command line to enter MATLAB commands or run MATLAB scripts
  • Workspace: This shows data created from the Command Window or in the MATLAB scripts...