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 COLLADA file of a robot to work with OpenRave

In this section, we will discuss how to use URDF robot models with OpenRave. Firstly, we will see how to convert a URDF in a collada file (.dae) format; this file will then be used to generate the IKFast source file. To convert a URDF model into a collada file, we can use a ROS package called collada_urdf. This can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-collada-urdf

We will work with the ABB IRB 6640 robot model, which can be found in the abb_irb6600_support package in the /urdf folder named irb6640.urdf. Alternatively, you can take this file from the ikfast_demo folder released with the book's source code. Copy this file into your working folder and run the following command for the conversion:

roscore && rosrun collada_urdf urdf_to_collada irb6640.urdf irb6640.dae  

The output of the previous command is the robotic model in the collada file format.

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