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

Important troubleshooting tips in ROS


We will now look at some of the common issues that are experienced when working with ROS, as well as tips on how to solve them.

One of ROS in-built tools to find issues in an ROS system is roswtf. roswtf is a command-line tool that checks for issues in the following areas of ROS:

  • Environment variables and configuration
  • Packages or meta-packages configuration
  • Launch files
  • Online graphs

Using roswtf

We can check the issues inside an ROS package by simply going into the package and entering roswtf. We can also check for issues in our ROS system by entering the following command:

$ roswtf

This command generates a report about the health of the system—for example, in the case of a wrong ROS hostname and master configuration, we will have the following report:

Figure 17: roswtf output in the case of a wrong ROS hostname configuration

We can also run roswtf on launch files to search for potential issues:

$ roswtf <file_name>.launch 

The wiki page of roswtf is available...