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

Chapter 4: Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo

After designing the 3D model of a robot, the next phase is to simulate it. Robot simulation will give you an idea of how robots operate in a virtual environment.

We are going to use the Gazebo (http://www.gazebosim.org/) simulator to simulate the seven Degree Of Freedom (DOF) arms and the mobile robot.

Gazebo is a multi-robot simulator for complex indoor and outdoor robotic simulation. We can simulate complex robots, robot sensors, and a variety of 3D objects. Gazebo already has simulation models of popular robots, sensors, and a variety of 3D objects in its repository (https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models/). We can directly use these models without having to create new ones.

Gazebo is perfectly integrated with ROS thanks to a proper ROS interface, which exposes the complete control of Gazebo in ROS. We can install Gazebo without ROS, but we should install the ROS-Gazebo interface to communicate from ROS to Gazebo.

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