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

Achieve a Goal through Reinforcement Learning

After the background on reinforcement learning that we provided in the previous chapter, we will go one step forward with GoPiGo3, making it not only perform perception tasks, but also trigger chained actions in sequence to achieve a pre-defined goal. That it is to say, it will have to decide what action to execute at every step of the simulation to achieve the goal. At the end of the execution of every action, it will be provided with a reward, which will show how good the decision was by the amount of reward given. After some training, this reinforcement will naturally drive its next decisions, improving the performance of the task.

For example, let's say that we set a target location and instruct the robot that it has to carry an object there. The way in which GoPiGo3 will be told that it is performing well is by giving it...