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 ROS package for the robot description

Before creating the URDF file for the robot, let's create an ROS package in the catkin workspace so that the robot model keeps using the following command:

catkin_create_pkg mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg roscpp tf geometry_msgs urdf rviz xacro   

The package mainly depends on the urdf and xacro packages. If these packages have not been installed on to your system, you can install them using the package manager:

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

We can create the urdf file of the robot inside this package and create launch files to display the created urdf file in RViz. The full package is available in the following Git repository; you can clone the repository for reference to implement this package, or you can get the package from the book's source code:

git clone https://github.com/qboticslabs/mastering_ros_3rd_edition.git
cd mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg...