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)

MDP and the Bellman equation

In order to solve any reinforcement learning problem, the problem should be defined or modeled as a MDP. A Markov property is termed by the following condition: the future is independent of the past, given the present. This means that the system doesn't depend on any past history of data and the future depends only on the present data. The best example to explain this with is rain prediction. Here, we're considering an analogy and not an actual rain estimation model.

There are various methods in which rain estimation work that may or may not need historical data for estimating "rain measure." We're not going to measure anything here but are instead going to predict whether it is going to rain or not. Hence, considering the MDP equation in terms of this analogy, the equation needs the current state to understand the future and...