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

Creating a custom ROS game controller interface


If you have played with a joystick with either Baxter or Crazyflie, you may think that the function of certain buttons or joysticks would be better with your own special design. Each type of game controller has one or more joysticks and various buttons or triggers to cause events depending on the game software being used. Here, for the Microsoft Xbox controller, we will do the following:

  • Show how to determine the mapping between controller joysticks, buttons, and triggers and the number corresponding to each using a graphical package, jstest-gtk

  • Use the terminal command jstest; this will enable you to determine the corresponding numbers of controller joysticks, buttons, and triggers

The following diagram shows the Xbox 360 game controller. Pushing a button changes the output from 0 (off) to 1 (on) on the channel corresponding to the pushed button, which in turn can be read by a program and used to start an application. Moving the stick outputs...