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)

Deep learning libraries

There are some popular deep learning libraries used in research and commercial applications. Let's look at them individually here:

  • TensorFlow: This is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. The TensorFlow library (https://www.tensorflow.org/) is designed for machine intelligence and developed by the Google Brain team. The main aim of this library is to perform machine learning and deep neural network research. It can be used in a wide variety of other domains as well.
  • Theano: Theano is an open source Python library (http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/) allowing us to streamline and assess mathematical expressions including multidimensional arrays proficiently. Theano was essentially created by the machine learning group at the Montreal University, Canada.
  • Torch: Torch is a scientific computing framework...