Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects - Second Edition

By : Ramkumar Gandhinathan
Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects - Second Edition

By: Ramkumar Gandhinathan

Overview of this book

Nowadays, heavy industrial robots placed in workcells are being replaced by new age robots called cobots, which don't need workcells. They are used in manufacturing, retail, banks, energy, and healthcare, among other domains. One of the major reasons for this rapid growth in the robotics market is the introduction of an open source robotics framework called the Robot Operating System (ROS). This book covers projects in the latest ROS distribution, ROS Melodic Morenia with Ubuntu Bionic (18.04). Starting with the fundamentals, this updated edition of ROS Robotics Projects introduces you to ROS-2 and helps you understand how it is different from ROS-1. You'll be able to model and build an industrial mobile manipulator in ROS and simulate it in Gazebo 9. You'll then gain insights into handling complex robot applications using state machines and working with multiple robots at a time. This ROS book also introduces you to new and popular hardware such as Nvidia's Jetson Nano, Asus Tinker Board, and Beaglebone Black, and allows you to explore interfacing with ROS. You'll learn as you build interesting ROS projects such as self-driving cars, making use of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and other key AI concepts. By the end of the book, you'll have gained the confidence to build interesting and intricate projects with ROS.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

ROS simulators

One of the open source robotic simulators tightly integrated with ROS is Gazebo (http://gazebosim.org). Gazebo is a dynamic robotic simulator that has a wide variety of robot models and extensive sensor support. The functionalities of Gazebo can be added via plugins. The sensor values can be accessed by ROS through topics, parameters, and services. Gazebo can be used when your simulation needs full compatibility with ROS. Most of the robotics simulators are proprietary and expensive; if you can't afford it, you can use Gazebo directly without any issues:

Gazebo simulator

The preceding is a PR2 robot model from OSRF. You can find the model at https://github.com/pr2/pr2_common, in the description folder.

The ROS interface of Gazebo is available at the following link: http://wiki.ros.org/gazebo.

Now that we know about the simulators of ROS, we can begin installing ROS Melodic on Ubuntu.