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

Running an environment

The goal of the rest of the chapter is to apply what you have learned about RL in general problems to a specific domain such as robotics. To easily transfer that knowledge, we will reproduce the simple cart pole example, modeling it as a robot in Gazebo. The code samples are in the cart-pole_ROS folder of the code repository of this chapter. Move to that location on your laptop:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/Chapter12_OpenAI_Gym/cart-pole_ROS

Inside, you will find two ROS packages, each one giving its name to the folder:

  • cartpole_description contains the Gazebo simulation framework for the cart pole using ROS. The structure of this package is very similar to the one described in Chapter 5, Simulating Robot Behavior with Gazebo. Hence, it is not necessary to dive into its details.
  • cartpole_dqn contains the OpenAI Gym environment for the preceding Gazebo simulation...