Book Image

Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Bernardo Ronquillo Japón
Book Image

Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Bernardo Ronquillo Japón

Overview of this book

Connecting a physical robot to a robot simulation using the Robot Operating System (ROS) infrastructure is one of the most common challenges faced by ROS engineers. With this book, you'll learn how to simulate a robot in a virtual environment and achieve desired behavior in equivalent real-world scenarios. This book starts with an introduction to GoPiGo3 and the sensors and actuators with which it is equipped. You'll then work with GoPiGo3's digital twin by creating a 3D model from scratch and running a simulation in ROS using Gazebo. Next, the book will show you how to use GoPiGo3 to build and run an autonomous mobile robot that is aware of its surroundings. Finally, you'll find out how a robot can learn tasks that have not been programmed in the code but are acquired by observing its environment. You'll even cover topics such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. By the end of this robot programming book, you'll be well-versed with the basics of building specific-purpose applications in robotics and developing highly intelligent autonomous robots from scratch.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Physical Robot Assembly and Testing
5
Section 2: Robot Simulation with Gazebo
8
Section 3: Autonomous Navigation Using SLAM
13
Section 4: Adaptive Robot Behavior Using Machine Learning

Dynamic simulation using Gazebo

In the previous chapter, you performed a very basic version of navigation, where the feedback to the robot about its environment always came from you as a human operator. For example, you saw that GoPiGo3 is advancing to an obstacle, so you made it turn left or right to avoid it.

This section takes you one step forward in remote control by providing feedback not only from your human vision, but also from robotic sensors. More precisely, GoPiGo3 will provide data from the Pi camera and from its distance sensor. The goal is that you can teleoperate it more precisely by getting as high-quality sensor data as possible. You may be able to guess at least two common scenarios in the real world where this kind of manual teleoperation is key for the execution of a planned task:

  • Surgical robot teleoperation: Where an expert surgeon can carry out a surgical...