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)

Multiple robot communication in ROS

The ROS system is a distributed computing environment that can run several nodes—not just on a single machine, but on multiple machines that communicate with each other, provided they are on the same network. This is advantageous in robotics applications as certain sensors demand sophisticated machines.

For instance, if we have a mobile robot that understands the environment through its sensors, such as ultrasonic sensors and cameras, it may need a simple processor that communicates serially with the microcontroller that the ultrasonic sensor is connected to. But a sensor such as a camera may need a more sophisticated processor for processing camera information. Instead of using high-end compute hardware, which is generally costly and sometimes bigger in form, we could make use of cloud services such as AWS or Google Cloud for processing...