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

Unit Testing of GoPiGo3

After finishing the assembly of the hardware, in this chapter, you will get familiar with how GoPiGo3 works using the JupyterLab environment, a friendly interface that takes the structure of a notebook composed of human-readable paragraphs followed by Python code snippets. You will produce two versions of each test program: the JupyterLab notebook and the pure Python script.

Using these programming tools, you will test each sensor/actuator individually and check that they're working properly while learning about the technology behind each of them.

We will be covering the following topics:

  • Getting started with Python programming under the user-friendly environment Jupyterlab
  • Testing the robot perception: distance sensor, line follower, and 2D
  • Testing the robot actuation: motors and encoders

If you follow the practical exercises, you'll learn...