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 sensors and drives

In this section, we will run some simple scripts in Python by using Jupyter Notebooks. From a terminal in your laptop, clone the book repository and go into the Chapter2_Unit_Tests folder to access the files for this chapter:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-ROS-for-Robotics-Programming
$ cd Hands-On-ROS-for-Robotics-Programming/Chapter2_Unit_Tests

For completeness, we have included the notebooks used in the previous section inside the lessons_GettingStarted folder.

Quick start with sensors and motors

To enter the Python environment of your robot, switch on the red board and connect to the GoPiGo Wi-Fi network from your laptop. Then, visit the following URL in the browser...