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

A quick introduction to ROS programming

This section is devoted to explaining an easy ROS example with GoPiGo3. By doing this, we can put our robot to work quickly so that, in later sections, we can deal with ROS commands and tools in a practical way, applying such commands and understanding what they do.

This very simple example is based on the distance sensor in GoPiGo3. It consists of publishing sensor readings and accessing them from other ROS nodes.

Setting up the workspace

To start using contributed ROS packages or to create your own, you will need to have a workspace in which to put the code. The step-by-step procedure to accomplish such a task is as follows:

  1. From a bash terminal, create a folder and initialize the...