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

Getting started with the Gazebo simulator

Let's go through a quick tour so that you have a clear understanding of what you can expect when implementing a dynamic simulation for GoPiGo3. Gazebo is an open source 3D robotics simulator and includes an ODE physics engine and OpenGL rendering, and supports code integration for closed-loop control in robot drives—that is, sensor simulation and actuator control. There are two new concepts within this definition. Let's explain each one:

  • Open Dynamics Engine (ODE), a physics engine written in C/C++ that includes two main components: rigid-body dynamics simulation and collision detection (https://www.ode.org/).
  • Open Graphics Library (OpenGL), which is both a cross-language and cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. This API is typically used to interact with a GPU in order to achieve hardware-accelerated...