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

Verifying a Gazebo model and viewing the URDF

Once the SDF definition has been completed in the gopigo.urdf file, you should perform some checks to ensure that the file can be read by Gazebo. To do so, navigate to the folder where the model resides:

$ roscd gazebo_basics/urdf

The roscd command is a very useful ROS command that's equivalent to the Linux cd command, but specifies the paths that are relative to a given package. It's also easier to use because all you have to do is provide the name of the package that you want to move to the Terminal. The first part, gazebo_basics, retrieves the absolute path of the package, as well as the second part of the folder or subfolder path you want to show. This ROS command, as well as other useful ones, will be covered in detail in the next chapter, under the Shell commands subsection.

Use the following two commands to print and...