Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Carol Fairchild, Lentin Joseph, Dr. Thomas L. Harman
Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Carol Fairchild, Lentin Joseph, Dr. Thomas L. Harman

Overview of this book

ROS is a robust robotics framework that works regardless of hardware architecture or hardware origin. It standardizes most layers of robotics functionality from device drivers to process control and message passing to software package management. But apart from just plain functionality, ROS is a great platform to learn about robotics itself and to simulate, as well as actually build, your first robots. This does not mean that ROS is a platform for students and other beginners; on the contrary, ROS is used all over the robotics industry to implement flying, walking and diving robots, yet implementation is always straightforward, and never dependent on the hardware itself. ROS Robotics has been the standard introduction to ROS for potential professionals and hobbyists alike since the original edition came out; the second edition adds a gradual introduction to all the goodness available with the Kinetic Kame release. By providing you with step-by-step examples including manipulator arms and flying robots, the authors introduce you to the new features. The book is intensely practical, with space given to theory only when absolutely necessary. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience on controlling robots with the best possible framework.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ROS Robotics By Example Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Configuring TurtleBot and installing the 3D sensor software


There are minor but important environmental variables and software that are needed for the TurtleBot based on your selection of 3D sensors. We have attached a Kinect Xbox 360 sensor to our TurtleBot, but we will provide instructions to configure each of the 3D sensors mentioned in this chapter. These environmental variables are used by the ROS launch files to launch the correct camera drivers. In ROS Kinetic, the Kinect, ASUS, and RealSense sensors are supported by different camera drivers, as described in the following sections.

Kinect

The environmental variables for the Kinect sensors are as follows:

export KINECT_DRIVER=freenect
export TURTLEBOT_3D_SENSOR=kinect

These variables should be added to the ~/.bashrc files of both the TurtleBot and the remote computer. For mapping and navigation a common 3dsensor launch file is utilized and these environment variables identify the 3D vision sensor attached to TurtleBot.

Libfreenect is an...