Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects - Second Edition

By : Ramkumar Gandhinathan
Book Image

ROS Robotics Projects - Second Edition

By: Ramkumar Gandhinathan

Overview of this book

Nowadays, heavy industrial robots placed in workcells are being replaced by new age robots called cobots, which don't need workcells. They are used in manufacturing, retail, banks, energy, and healthcare, among other domains. One of the major reasons for this rapid growth in the robotics market is the introduction of an open source robotics framework called the Robot Operating System (ROS). This book covers projects in the latest ROS distribution, ROS Melodic Morenia with Ubuntu Bionic (18.04). Starting with the fundamentals, this updated edition of ROS Robotics Projects introduces you to ROS-2 and helps you understand how it is different from ROS-1. You'll be able to model and build an industrial mobile manipulator in ROS and simulate it in Gazebo 9. You'll then gain insights into handling complex robot applications using state machines and working with multiple robots at a time. This ROS book also introduces you to new and popular hardware such as Nvidia's Jetson Nano, Asus Tinker Board, and Beaglebone Black, and allows you to explore interfacing with ROS. You'll learn as you build interesting ROS projects such as self-driving cars, making use of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and other key AI concepts. By the end of the book, you'll have gained the confidence to build interesting and intricate projects with ROS.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Opportunities for ROS in industries and research

Now that we've installed ROS and set up our ROS workspace, we can discuss the advantages of using it. Why is learning ROS so important for robotics researchers? The reason is that ROS is becoming a generic framework for programming all kinds of robots. So, robots in universities and industries mainly use ROS.

Here are some famous robotics companies using ROS for their robots:

Knowledge of ROS will help you land a robotics application engineering job easily. If you go through the skillset of any job related to robotics, you're bound to find ROS on it.

There are independent courses and workshops in universities and industries to teach ROS development in robots. Knowing ROS will help you to get an internship and MS, Ph.D., and postdoc opportunities from prestigious robotic institutions such as CMU's Robotics Institute (http://www.ri.cmu.edu/) and UPenn's GRAP lab (https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/).

The following chapters will help you build a practical foundation and core skills in ROS.