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)

Deep learning for robotics

Here are the main areas in robotics where we can apply deep learning:

  • Deep-learning-based object detector: Imagine a robot wants to pick a specific object from a group of objects. What can be the first step in solving this problem? It should identify the object first, right? We can use image processing algorithms such as segmentation and Haar training to detect an object, but the problem with those techniques is that they are not scalable and can't be used for many objects. Using deep learning algorithms, we can train a large neural network with a large dataset. It can have good accuracy and scalability compared to other methods. Datasets such as ImageNet (http://image-net.org/), which have a large collection of image datasets, can be used for training. We also get trained models that we can just use without training. We will look at an ImageNet...