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 ROS package for the robot description


Before creating the URDF file for the robot, let's create an ROS package in the catkin workspace so that the robot model keeps using the following command:

$ catkin_create_pkg mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg roscpp tf 
 geometry_msgs urdf rviz xacro 

The package mainly depends on the urdf and xacro packages. If these packages have not been installed on to your system, you can install them using the package manager:

$sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-urdf$sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-xacro

We can create the urdf file of the robot inside this package and create launch files to display the created urdf in RViz. The full package is available on the following Git repository; you can clone the repository for a reference to implement this package, or you can get the package from the book's source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/jocacace/mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg.git

Before creating the urdf file for this robot, let's create three...