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

Creating the MoveIt IKFast plugin for the ABB IRB 6640 robot

We have seen the MoveIt package for the ABB robot IRB 6640 model. This robot works with a default numerical solver. In this section, we will discuss how to generate an IK solver plugin using IKFast, a powerful inverse kinematics solver provided within Rosen Diankov's OpenRAVE motion planning software. At the end of this section, we will be able to run the MoveIt demo of this robot, using our custom inverse kinematic plugin.

In short, we will build an IKFast MoveIt plugin for the robot ABB IRB 66400. This plugin can be selected during the MoveIt setup wizard or we can mention it in the config/kinematics.yaml file of the moveit-config package.

Prerequisites for developing the MoveIt IKFast plugin

The following is the configuration we have used for developing the MoveIt IKFast plugin:

  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
  • ROS Noetic desktop, full installation
  • OpenRave