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

Important troubleshooting tips in ROS

In this section, we'll look at some of the common issues that are experienced when working with ROS, as well as tips on how to solve them.

One of ROS's in-built tools for finding issues in a ROS system is roswtf. roswtf is a command-line tool that checks for issues in the following areas of ROS:

  • Environment variables and configuration
  • Packages or metapackages configuration
  • Launch files
  • Online graphs

Now, let's take a look at using roswtf.

Using roswtf

We can check the issues inside a ROS package by simply going into the package and entering roswtf. We can also check for issues in our ROS system by entering the following command:

roswtf

This command generates a report about the health of the system – for example, in the case of an incorrect ROS hostname and master configuration, we will have the following report:

Figure 16.10 – roswtf output in the case...