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

Components in navigation

Navigation is the movement of a robot from the current position to a target location following a planned trajectory. This ability in a robot means that it is capable of determining its position at any point along the trajectory, as well as to setting up a plan of action given a representation of the environment, such as a map. We should also add the ability to avoid dynamic obstacles or others that were not present when the map was built for the first time.

There are four components to consider when building the navigation ability:

  • A map of the environment, preexisting and given to the robot as an input, or built by its own means using the sensory data that it collects with its sensors. This whole process, that is, data acquisition plus interpretation, constitutes what we call the capability of robot perception. One well-known technique that takes advantage...