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

ROS community level

These are ROS resources that enable a new community in ROS to exchange software and knowledge. The various resources in these communities are as follows:

  • Distributions: Similar to the Linux distribution, ROS distributions are a collection of versioned metapackages that we can install. The ROS distributions allow us to easily install and collect ROS software. They also maintain consistent versions across a set of software.
  • Repositories: ROS relies on a federated network of code repositories, where different institutions can develop and release their own robot software components.
  • The ROS Wiki: The ROS community Wiki is the main forum for documenting information about ROS. Anyone can sign up for an account and contribute their own documentation, provide corrections or updates, write tutorials, and more.
  • Bug ticket system: If we find a bug in the existing software or need to add a new feature, we can use this resource.
  • Mailing lists: We can use the ROS-users mailing list to ask questions about ROS software and share program problems with the community.
  • ROS Answers: This website resource helps us ask questions related to ROS. If we post our doubts on this site, other ROS users can see them and provide solutions.
  • Blog: The ROS blog updates with news, photos, and videos related to the ROS community (http://www.ros.org/news).

Now, let's take a look at prerequisites for starting with ROS.