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

This chapter has been a quick and practical introduction to how you can apply reinforcement learning so that a robot can perform useful tasks such as transporting materials to a target location. You should be aware that this kind of machine learning technique is at the very beginning of its maturity, and there are as yet few practical solutions working in the real world. The reason is that the process of training is very expensive in terms of time and cost, since you have to perform thousands of episodes to get a well-trained model, and later replay the process with the physical robot to address behavioral differences between the real world and the simulated environment.

Be aware that the training process in Gazebo is not a substitute for training in the real world: a simulation necessarily implies a simplification of the reality, and every difference between the training...