Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, Third edition - Third Edition

By : Lentin Joseph, Jonathan Cacace
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, Third edition - Third Edition

By: Lentin Joseph, Jonathan Cacace

Overview of this book

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a software framework used for programming complex robots. ROS enables you to develop software for building complex robots without writing code from scratch, saving valuable development time. Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming provides complete coverage of the advanced concepts using easy-to-understand, practical examples and step-by-step explanations of essential concepts that you can apply to your ROS robotics projects. The book begins by helping you get to grips with the basic concepts necessary for programming robots with ROS. You'll then discover how to develop a robot simulation, as well as an actual robot, and understand how to apply high-level capabilities such as navigation and manipulation from scratch. As you advance, you'll learn how to create ROS controllers and plugins and explore ROS's industrial applications and how it interacts with aerial robots. Finally, you'll discover best practices and methods for working with ROS efficiently. By the end of this ROS book, you'll have learned how to create various applications in ROS and build your first ROS robot.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1 – ROS Programming Essentials
4
Section 2 – ROS Robot Simulation
11
Section 3 – ROS Robot Hardware Prototyping
15
Section 4 – Advanced ROS Programming

Using the PX4 flight control stack

PX4 firmware allows developers to directly simulate the code running on the autopilot board on your Linux system. Additionally, it is possible to modify the autopilot source code and reload the new version on the Pixhawk board. To install the firmware on your system, you will firstly need to download it. Even though it is not mandatory, linking this with the ROS will conveniently place it in your ROS workspace. To download the autopilot code, enter your ROS workspace and use the following command:

git clone https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot.git --recursive

This repository contains all the necessary files to run the PX4 firmware on a ROS-Gazebo simulation, using different UAV quadrotors equipped with a camera, a depth camera, a laser scanner, and so on. Simulation represents a quick, easy, and safe way to test changes to PX4 code before attempting to fly in the real world. It is also a good way to start flying with PX4 when you have not yet...