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)

Getting started with a VR headset and Leap Motion

This section is for beginners who haven't worked with VR headsets or Leap Motion yet. A VR headset is a head-mounted display, in which we can put a smartphone, or which has a built-in display that can be connected to HDMI or some other display port. A VR headset can create a virtual 3D environment by mimicking human vision, that is, stereo vision.

Human vision works like this: we have two eyes and get two separate and slightly different images in each eye. The brain then combines these two images and generates a 3D image of the surroundings. Similarly, VR headsets have two lenses and a display. The display can be inbuilt or a smartphone. This screen will show a separate view of the left and right images, and when we put the smartphone or built-in display into the headset, it will focus and reshape using two lenses and will...