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

Moving robot joints using ROS controllers in Gazebo


In this section, we are going to discuss how to move each joint of the robot in Gazebo.

To move each joint, we need to assign an ROS controller. In particular, for each joint we need to attach a controller that is compatible with the hardware interface mentioned inside the transmission tags.

An ROS controller mainly consists of a feedback mechanism that can receive a set point and control the output using the feedback from the actuators.

The ROS controller interacts with the hardware using the hardware interface. The main function of the hardware interface is to act as a mediator between ROS controllers and the real or simulated hardware, allocating the resources to control it considering the data generated by the ROS controller.

In this robot, we have defined the position controllers, velocity controllers, effort controllers, and so on. The ROS controllers are provided by a set of packages called ros_control.

For a proper understanding of how...