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 with Xtion Pro

Now that we have learned about the camera plugin definition in Gazebo, we can launch our complete simulation using the following command:

roslaunch seven_dof_arm_gazebo seven_dof_arm_with_rgbd_world.launch  

We can see the robot model with a sensor on the top of the arm, as shown here:

Figure 4.2 – Simulation of a seven DOF arm with Asus Xtion Pro in Gazebo

We can now work with the simulated rgb-d sensor as if it were directly plugged into our computer. So, we can check whether it provides the correct image output.

Visualizing the 3D sensor data

After launching the simulation using the preceding command, we can check the topics generated by the sensor plugin:

Figure 4.3 – rgb-d image topics generated by Gazebo

To see the image data of a 3D vision sensor using a tool called image_view, do the following:

  • View the RGB raw image:
        ...