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)

Understanding the swarm robotics application

When we speak about using more than one or two robots for an application, the application is usually termed a swarm robotics application. Swarm robotics is the study of how a collection of robots are used to perform a complex task. They are inspired by biological species that work in groups, such as a collection of bees, a flock of birds, or a group of ants.

All of these creatures work collectively and carry out tasks such as building the beehive, collecting food, or building ant nests, respectively. If you consider ants, they have a load-carrying capacity of 50-100 times their own weight. Now, imagine a group of such ants lifting even more than what they could lift individually. This is how swarm robotics works too. Imagine that our robot arm only has a designed payload of 5 kg and needs lift a 15-20 kg object. We could achieve the...