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

SLAM for Robot Navigation

In this chapter, you will deep dive into robot navigation, a ubiquitous task in robotics engineering. Typical use cases include self-driving cars and transporting materials in a factory. You will find that the map we generated previously by applying SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) is used for path planning along the way. Given an initial pose, the robot will travel along the optimal path and should be capable of reacting to dynamic events, that is, it should be able to avoid the obstacles (static or dynamic) that appeared after the map was built.

This chapter is a natural extension of the previous one. In the previous chapter, you gained a practical understanding of SLAM and navigation, and you did that inside the Gazebo simulator using a virtual model of GoPiGo3. Now, you are ready to complete the exercise again with a physical robot. By...