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)

Improvements to the robot

When working with robots, it can sometimes be hectic and tedious to get them to work just the way we want them to. Let's look into some improvements that we could consider to make our application successful enough in certain aspects:

  • Use of a high-end CPU- or GPU-based compute: The preceding application should work just fine in general. But since robot algorithms are mostly based on probabilistic approaches, most of the solutions are assumption-based. Hence, there are possibilities for errors or the application to not work as expected. At times, if you have a lower-spec computer, there are chances that Gazebo might crash and might cause you trouble when you view the complete application.
  • Tuning the navigation stack for better localization: There are some best practices that can help us tune certain parameters in the algorithm. This helps us get...