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 microcontroller boards

In this section, we will look at some of the popular microcontroller boards and microcomputers that can be used in robots:

  • Arduino Mega
  • STM32
  • ESP8266
  • ROS-supported embedded boards

Arduino Mega

Arduino is one of the most popular embedded controller boards that can be used in robots. It is mainly used for prototyping electronics projects and robots. The boards mainly contain AVR series controllers, in which its pins are mapped as Arduino board pins. The main reason for the Arduino board's popularity is its programming and easiness in prototyping. The Arduino APIs and packages are very easy to use. So, we can prototype our application without much difficulty. The Arduino programming...