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)

Benchmarking embedded boards

Now that you have seen some embedded boards, have you ever wondered what board to choose for your robotics project? Which board would have the perfect amount of power and capacity to run your application? All these questions can be answered using a simple test called a benchmark. Benchmarking or a benchmark is a test that is used to examine and judge the capabilities of such embedded boards. They're a group of tests that screen specific capabilities such as CPU clock speed, graphics, and memory.

Note that benchmarks do not give accurate results but give precise results that help us to understand specific aspects of SBC, as we mentioned earlier. There are a bunch of such benchmarks available online. You can see a few tests related to our projects here. We shall make use of the benchmark suites from PTS (http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/). The...