Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular robotics software frameworks in research and industry. It has various features for implementing different capabilities in a robot without implementing them from scratch. This book starts by showing you the fundamentals of ROS so you understand the basics of differential robots. Then, you'll learn about robot modeling and how to design and simulate it using ROS. Moving on, we'll design robot hardware and interfacing actuators. Then, you'll learn to configure and program depth sensors and LIDARs using ROS. Finally, you'll create a GUI for your robot using the Qt framework. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a clear idea of how to integrate and assemble everything into a robot and how to bundle the software package.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Working with a TurtleBot 2 simulation

After working with Gazebo, now it's time to run a simulation on it and work with some robots. One of the popular robots available for education and research is TurtleBot. The TurtleBot software was developed within the ROS framework, and there is a good simulation of its operations available in Gazebo. The popular versions of TurtleBot are TurtleBot 2 and 3. We will learn about TurtleBot 2 in this section because our development of Chefbot was inspired by its design.

Installing TurtleBot 2 simulation packages in Ubuntu 16.04 is straightforward. You can use the following command to install TurtleBot 2 simulation packages for Gazebo:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-turtlebot-gazebo  

After installing the packages, we can start running the simulation. There are several launch files inside the turtlebot-gazebo packages that have different...