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

Writing an RViz plugin for teleoperation

In this section, we will see how to create an RViz plugin from scratch. The objective of this plugin is to teleoperate the robot from RViz. Normally, we use separate teleoperation nodes for controlling the robot, but using this plugin, we can mention the teleop topic and the linear and angular velocity, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 13.5 – RViz Teleop plugin

In the following section, we discuss the detailed procedure of building this plugin.

The methodology of building a RViz plugin

Before starting to build the teleoperation plugin, we should understand how to write a RViz plugin in general. The standard method to build a ROS plugin is applicable for this plugin too. The difference is that the RViz plugin is GUI-based. RViz is written using a GUI framework called Qt, so we need to create a GUI in Qt and, using Qt APIs, we have to get the GUI values and send them to the ROS system.

The following...