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)

Bridging ROS-1 and ROS-2

As we already know, ROS-2 is still under heavy development and there isn't a proper long-term release. Hence, writing nodes in ROS-2 directly or porting them to ROS-2 immediately would be an arduous task. There is an option where you could still use ROS-1 packages with ROS-2 packages to develop your projects. This is done through a package called ros1_bridge.

It is actually an ROS-2 package, which establishes the automatic or manual mapping of messages, topics, and services and communicates between ROS-1 and ROS-2 nodes. It could subscribe to messages in a ROS version and then publish them in the other ROS version. This package comes in handy when you would like to use a simulator such as Gazebo with ROS-2 to test your project. There's only a limited number of messages supported in the ros1_bridge package at the time of writing. Hopefully, other...