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

Case study 1 – writing a ROS distance-sensor package

In this section, you will create a ROS package from scratch and produce the code to provide minimal ROS functionality with GoPiGo3, that is, reading its distance sensor. Be aware that the code you previously cloned at this location is the working solution for what your code is expected to do:

 ~/Hands-On-ROS-for-Robotics-Programming/Chapter6_ROS_programming/pkg_mygopigo

We encourage you to try to build the ROS package by yourself, following the explanations that are provided next in this chapter.

Creating a new package

First, let's set up a folder in the workspace where we will place the package files:

  1. Move to the src location in the catkin_ws worspace folder...