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

Creating the COLLADA file of a robot to work with OpenRave


In this section, we will discuss how to use URDF robot models with OpenRave. Firstly, we will see how to convert an URDF in a collada file (.dae) format; this file will be then used to generate the IKFast source file. To convert a URDF model into a collada file, we can use a ROS package, called collada_urdf.

We will work with the ABB IRB 6640 robot model, which can be found in the abb_irb6600_support package in the /urdf folder named irb6640.urdf. Alternatively, you can take this file from the ikfast_demo folder released with the book code. Copy this file into your working folder and run the following command for the conversion:

$ roscore && rosrun collada_urdf urdf_to_collada irb6640.urdf irb6640.dae

The output of the previous command is the robotic model in the collada file format.

Note

In most of the cases, this command fails because most of the URDF file contains STL meshes and it may not convert into DAE as we expected. If...