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

Inspecting the GoPiGo3 model in ROS with RViz

Now, it's time to start working with ROS! You are going to discover roslaunch, the ROS command that allows us to launch several nodes in one shot, avoiding the need to open separate Terminals, as we did in the previous chapter.

Given that you already cloned the code repository of this book, the files that we will deal with are inside the Chapter4_RViz_basics folder of the repository, and all of them are part of the rviz_basics ROS package, as defined within package.xml. The file structure of this chapter can be seen in the following screenshot of the RoboWare Studio IDE:

You can obtain this tree structure in the Terminal by using the tree bash command:

$ tree ~/catkin_ws/src/book/Chapter4_RViz_basics

Bear in mind that it does not come with Ubuntu by default and that you may need to install it:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt...