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 5: Simulating Robots Using ROS, CoppeliaSim, and Webots

Having learned how to simulate robots with Gazebo, in this chapter we will discuss how to use the other two powerful robot-simulation software: CoppeliaSim (http://www.coppeliarobotics.com) and Webots (https://cyberbotics.com/).

These are multiplatform robotic simulators. CoppeliaSim is developed by Coppelia Robotics. It offers many simulation models of popular industrial and mobile robots ready to be used, and different functionalities that can be easily integrated and combined through a dedicated application programming interface (API). In addition, it can operate with Robot Operating System (ROS) using a proper communication interface that allows us to control the simulation scene and the robots via topics and services. As with Gazebo, CoppeliaSim can be used as a standalone software, while an external plugin must be installed to work with ROS. As for Webots, it is a free and open source software used to simulate...