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)

Introduction to ROS-2 and Its Capabilities

ROS or, to be more specific, ROS-1, has helped robotics reach a different milestone in the open source community. While there were difficulties connecting the hardware and software and synchronizing them, ROS-1 paved the way for a simple communication strategy that has helped the community to connect any sophisticated sensor to a microcomputer or microcontroller with ease. Over the past decade, ROS-1 has grown and has a huge package list, where each and every package solves a problem either in bits or in full, and has eliminated the concept of reinventing the wheel. These packages have led to a whole new way of looking at robotics and providing intelligence to the currently available systems. Connecting several such smaller packages could create a new complex autonomous system on its own.

Though ROS-1 has given us the liberty of communicating...