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

Setting up Webots with ROS

As already done with CoppeliaSim, we need to install Webots on our system before setting it up with ROS. Webots is a multiplatform simulation software supported by Windows, Linux, and macOS. This software was initially developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Now, it is developed by Cyberbotics, and it is released under the free and open source Apache 2 license. Webots provides a complete development environment to model, program, and simulate robots. It has been designed for professional use and it is widely used in industry, education, and research.

You can choose different ways to install the simulator. You can download the .deb package from the Webots web page (http://www.cyberbotics.com/#download) or use the Debian/Ubuntu Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) package manager. Assuming that you are running Ubuntu, let's start by authenticating the Cyberbotics repository, as follows:

wget -qO- https://cyberbotics.com...