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 the RViz tool and its plugins

The RViz tool is an official 3D visualization tool of ROS. Almost all kinds of data from sensors can be viewed through this tool. RViz will be installed along with the full ROS desktop installation. Let's launch RViz and see the basic components present in RViz. Make sure you are executing these commands in separate terminals (or tabs).

Start roscore:

roscore

Start rviz:

rviz

The important sections of the RViz GUI are marked, and the uses of each section are shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 13.4 – Sections of RViz

We have seen how to work with RViz in ROS, and have seen different sections in RViz. In the following sections, we will provide a detailed explanation of each section of RViz.

The Displays panel

The panel on the left side of RViz is called the Displays panel. The Displays panel contains a list of the display plugins of RViz and its properties. The main use of...