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

Summary

In this chapter, we mainly replicated what we have already done in the previous chapter with Gazebo, using other robot simulators: CoppeliaSim and Webots. These are multiplatform simulation software programs that integrate different technologies and are very versatile. Thanks to their intuitive UIs, they might be easier to use for new users.

We mainly simulated two robots, one imported using the URDF file of the seven-DOF arm designed in previous chapters, with the other being a popular differential wheeled robot provided by the Webots simulation models. We learned how to interface and control the robot joints of our model with ROS and how to move a differential-drive mobile robot using topics.

In the next chapter, we will see how to interface the robotic arm with the ROS MoveIt package and the mobile robot with the Navigation stack.