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)

Designing and working on the project

This project can be divided into two sections: teleoperation using Leap Motion and streaming images to an Android phone to get a VR experience inside a VR headset. Before going on to discuss each design aspect, let's look at how we can interconnect these devices. The following diagram shows how the components are interconnected for this project:

Hardware components and connection

You can see that each device (that is, the PC and Android phone) is connected to a Wi-Fi router, and the router has assigned an IP address to each device. Each device communicates using these IP addresses. You will see the importance of these addresses in the upcoming sections.

Next, we will examine how we can teleoperate a robot in ROS using Leap Motion. We will be controlling it while wearing the VR headset. This means that we don't need to press any keys...