Book Image

Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Bernardo Ronquillo Japón
Book Image

Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Bernardo Ronquillo Japón

Overview of this book

Connecting a physical robot to a robot simulation using the Robot Operating System (ROS) infrastructure is one of the most common challenges faced by ROS engineers. With this book, you'll learn how to simulate a robot in a virtual environment and achieve desired behavior in equivalent real-world scenarios. This book starts with an introduction to GoPiGo3 and the sensors and actuators with which it is equipped. You'll then work with GoPiGo3's digital twin by creating a 3D model from scratch and running a simulation in ROS using Gazebo. Next, the book will show you how to use GoPiGo3 to build and run an autonomous mobile robot that is aware of its surroundings. Finally, you'll find out how a robot can learn tasks that have not been programmed in the code but are acquired by observing its environment. You'll even cover topics such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. By the end of this robot programming book, you'll be well-versed with the basics of building specific-purpose applications in robotics and developing highly intelligent autonomous robots from scratch.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Physical Robot Assembly and Testing
5
Section 2: Robot Simulation with Gazebo
8
Section 3: Autonomous Navigation Using SLAM
13
Section 4: Adaptive Robot Behavior Using Machine Learning

Summary

In this chapter, you have achieved correspondence between the physical GoPiGo3 and its virtual model in Gazebo. You have checked how it doesn't matter whether you're controlling the actual robot or a virtual robot from the point of view of ROS. Since both are moved using the same topic, /cmd_vel, ROS does not care about which type of robot you're dealing with.

This fact explains how, from the point of view of ROS, you have the choice to test your code with a virtual robot and then safely apply it to the physical robot. We just need to launch the ROS node of the physical robot. This is useful in three situations. First, when you are developing a new application for an existing robot, you can debug the code with a virtual model in Gazebo. Second, when you do not have available the hardware of the robot – because you are still deciding which one to buy...