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

Getting Started with ROS

Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source piece of software. Its development started at Willow Garage, a technology incubator and robotics research laboratory. Its origin dates back to several projects at Stanford University from the mid-2000s, where researchers found themselves reinventing the wheel every time they had to build the software for each project.

In 2007, Willow Garage took the lead and gave rise to ROS. The main goal was to reuse existing code and make it possible to prototype new robot designs quickly, focusing on high-level functionality and minimizing the need for editing code. If you are curious about how ROS has become the de facto standard for robot application development, you can view an interactive page at https://www.ros.org/history.

ROS is intended for the development of applications where different devices have to talk to...