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 robot modeling using xacro


The flexibility of URDF reduces when we work with complex robot models. Some of the main features that URDF is missing are simplicity, reusability, modularity, and programmability.

If someone wants to reuse a URDF block 10 times in his robot description, he can copy and paste the block 10 times. If there is an option to use this code block and make multiple copies with different settings, it will be very useful while creating the robot description.

The URDF is a single file and we can't include other URDF files inside it. This reduces the modular nature of the code. All code should be in a single file, which reduces the code's simplicity.

Also, if there is some programmability, such as adding variables, constants, mathematical expressions, and conditional statements, in the description language, it will be more user-friendly.

The robot modeling using xacro meets all of these conditions. Some of the main features of xacro are as follows:

  • Simplify URDF:...