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)

Creating a Self-Driving Car Using ROS

In this chapter, we will discuss a technology that is trending in the robotics industry: driverless or self-driving cars. Many of you may have heard about this technology; those who haven't will get an introduction in the first section of this chapter.

In this chapter, we will first start with a software block diagram of a typical self-driving car. We will then learn how to simulate and interface self-driving car sensors in ROS. We will also cover the interfacing of a drive-by-wire car into ROS, visualize the car virtually, and read its sensor information. Creating a self-driving car from scratch is out of the scope of this book, but this chapter will give you an abstract idea of self-driving car components and tutorials to simulate it.

This chapter will cover the following important topics:

  • Getting started with self-driving cars
  • A software...