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 actions

Let's start this section with an example. Let's assume there's a restaurant that uses robots as its waiters to help serve food to customers. Let's say that once the customer has taken their seat, they call the waiter by pressing a simple button on their table. The waiter robot understands the call and navigates to the table, takes the order from the customer, goes to the kitchen to place the order to the chef, and delivers the food to the customer once food is ready. Here, the robot tasks are to navigate to the customer's place, take the order, go to the kitchen, and bring food back to the customer.

A typical approach would be to define a script with multiple functions for individual tasks, put them together through a series of condition or case statements, and run the application. Well, the application might work as expected...