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

Configuring and working with the Navigation Stack

After creating the hardware interface and low-level controller, we need to configure the Navigation Stack to perform SLAM and Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization (AMCL) to build the map, localize the robot, and perform autonomous navigation. In Chapter 6, Using the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation Stack, we saw the basic packages in the Navigation Stack. To build the map of the environment, we will configure gmapping and move_base, together with the global and local planners and global and local cost maps. To perform localization, we will configure the amcl node. We start with the gmapping node.

Configuring the gmapping node and creating a map

gmapping is the package to perform SLAM (http://wiki.ros.org/gmapping). Remo's gmapping node parameters are in diffbot_slam/config/gmapping_params.yaml and loaded with diffbot_slam/launch/diffbot_gmapping.launch. By fine-tuning the parameters, we improve the accuracy of the gmapping node. For...