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 MoveIt IKFast plugin

One of the default numerical IK solvers in ROS is KDL. This library is used to calculate the direct and inverse kinematics of a robot using the URDF. KDL mainly uses DOF > 6. In DOF <= 6 robots, we can use analytic solvers, which are much faster than numerical solvers, such as KDL. Most industrial arms have DOF <= 6, so it will be good if we make an analytical solver plugin for each arm. The robot will work on the KDL solver too, but if we want a fast IK solution, we can choose something such as the IKFast module to generate analytical solver-based plugins for MoveIt. We can check which are the IKFast plugin packages present in the robot (for example, universal robots and ABB):

  • ur_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins of UR-5 and UR-10 robots from Universal Robotics.
  • abb_irb2400_moveit_plugins/irb2400_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins for the ABB robot model IRB 2400.

We...