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

Simulating the robotic arm using Gazebo and ROS

In the previous chapter, we designed a seven DOF arm. In this section, we will simulate the robot in Gazebo using ROS.

Before starting with Gazebo and ROS, we should install the following packages to work with Gazebo and ROS:

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-noetic-gazebo-msgs ros-noetic-gazebo-plugins ros-noetic-gazebo-ros-control

The default version installed from Noetic ROS packages is Gazebo 11.x. The use of each package is as follows:

  • gazebo_ros_pkgs: This contains wrappers and tools for interfacing ROS with Gazebo.
  • gazebo-msgs: This contains messages and service data structures for interfacing with Gazebo from ROS.
  • gazebo-plugins: This contains Gazebo plugins for sensors, actuators, and so on.
  • gazebo-ros-control: This contains standard controllers to communicate between ROS and Gazebo.

After installation, check whether Gazebo is properly installed using the following commands...