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

Understanding and creating a Gazebo plugin

Gazebo plugins help us to control the robot models, sensors, world properties, and even the way Gazebo runs. As with pluginlib and nodelets, Gazebo plugins are a set of C++ code that can be dynamically loaded/unloaded from the Gazebo simulator.

Using plugins, we can access all the components of Gazebo, which are independent of ROS so that they can be shared with people who are not using ROS (that is, the components). We can mainly classify the plugins as follows:

  • The world plugin: Using the world plugin, we can control the properties of a specific world in Gazebo. We can change the physics engine, the lighting, and other world properties using this plugin.
  • The model plugin: The model plugin is attached to a specific model in Gazebo and controls its properties. The parameters, such as the joint state of the model, control of the joints, and so on, can be controlled using this plugin.
  • The sensor plugin: The sensor plugins...