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

Interfacing USB webcams in ROS

We can interface with an ordinary webcam or a laptop cam in ROS. Overall, there are no ROS-specific packages we must install to use web cameras. If the camera is working in Ubuntu/Linux, it may be supported by the ROS driver too. After plugging in the camera, check whether a /dev/videoX device file has been created. You can also check this by using applications such as Cheese, VLC, and others. A guide for checking whether the webcam is supported on Ubuntu is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam.

We can find the video devices that are present on the system by using the following command:

ls /dev/ | grep video    

If you get an output of video0, then this confirms that a USB camera is available for use.

After ensuring the webcam supports Ubuntu, we can install a ROS webcam driver called usb_cam using the following command:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-usb-cam  

We can install the latest...