Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular robotics software frameworks in research and industry. It has various features for implementing different capabilities in a robot without implementing them from scratch. This book starts by showing you the fundamentals of ROS so you understand the basics of differential robots. Then, you'll learn about robot modeling and how to design and simulate it using ROS. Moving on, we'll design robot hardware and interfacing actuators. Then, you'll learn to configure and program depth sensors and LIDARs using ROS. Finally, you'll create a GUI for your robot using the Qt framework. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a clear idea of how to integrate and assemble everything into a robot and how to bundle the software package.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Working with Inertial Measurement Units

An inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an electronic device that measures velocity, orientation, and gravitational forces using a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. IMUs have a lot of applications in robotics; some of the applications are applied in balancing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and robot navigation.

In this section, we will discuss the role of IMUs in mobile robot navigation and some of the latest IMUs on the market and their interfacing with Launchpad.

Inertial navigation

An IMU provides acceleration and orientation relative to inertial space. If you know the initial position, velocity, and orientation, you can calculate the velocity by integrating...