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

Technical requirements

The code files for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-ROS-for-Robotics-Programming/tree/master/Chapter5_Gazebo_basics.

By completing the previous chapter, you should have cloned this book's code repository into the home folder of your laptop. In case you didn't, we'll go over this now. From a Terminal on your laptop, clone the repository into your home folder, like so:

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

Next, we copy the code for this chapter to the ROS workspace. This way, you will have a cleaner ROS environment:

$ cp -R ~/Hands-On-ROS-for-Robotics-Programming/Chapter5_Gazebo_basics ~/catkin_ws/src

This chapter contains a new ROS package called gazebo_basics, so rebuild the workspace so that it is known to your ROS environment:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws
...