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

Creating the Virtual Two-Wheeled ROS Robot

RViz is a 3D visualization tool that can display robot models. It provides a configurable Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows the user to display any information they may request for the task being carrying out. RViz can be used for both robot visualization and for debugging specific features while building the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) model. This format uses XML to simulate the robot.

To illustrate how to use RViz and URDF, in this chapter, you will build a simple two-wheeled robot, which is the digital twin of GoPiGo3. You will create the URDF file that describes the robot's main components. This file acts as the input for visualization in several ROS tools – not only RViz, but also the Gazebo simulation tool, which also includes a physics engine. Gazebo will be covered in the next chapter, while in...