Book Image

Robot Operating System Cookbook

By : Kumar Bipin
Book Image

Robot Operating System Cookbook

By: Kumar Bipin

Overview of this book

This book will leverage the power of ROS with an introduction to its core and advanced concepts through exciting recipes. You will get acquainted with the use of different synchronous and asynchronous communication methods, including messages, services, and actions. You will learn how to use the various debugging and visualization tools used in development and how to interface sensors and actuators with the ROS framework. Firstly, you will get to grips with ROS simulation frameworks, such as Gazebo and RotorS for modeling and simulating any physical robot and virtual environment. You will also cover mobile robotics, micro-aerial vehicles, and robotic arms, which are the leading branches of robotic applications. Robot Operating System Cookbook will also guide you in the development of an autonomous navigation framework for both mobile robots and micro-aerial vehicles. Finally, you will explore ROS-Industrial, an open source project that extends the advanced capabilities of ROS software to manufacturing industries.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Debugging and profiling ROS nodes

ROS nodes can be debugged in a similar way to conventional programs since they run as a process with the associated pid in the Linux runtime environment. Therefore, we can debug them using standard tools, such as gdb, check for memory leaks with memcheck, and profile for performance using valgrind or both.

In the following sections, we will learn how to configure these tools in the ROS framework. Next, we will look into how to add logging messages to the source code of programs in order to make them observable so that we can diagnose basic problems in runtime without the need to debug the executable binaries. Later, we will discuss ROS introspection tools, which help in easily detecting broken connections between nodes.

Getting ready

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