Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Carol Fairchild, Lentin Joseph, Dr. Thomas L. Harman
Book Image

ROS Robotics By Example, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Carol Fairchild, Lentin Joseph, Dr. Thomas L. Harman

Overview of this book

ROS is a robust robotics framework that works regardless of hardware architecture or hardware origin. It standardizes most layers of robotics functionality from device drivers to process control and message passing to software package management. But apart from just plain functionality, ROS is a great platform to learn about robotics itself and to simulate, as well as actually build, your first robots. This does not mean that ROS is a platform for students and other beginners; on the contrary, ROS is used all over the robotics industry to implement flying, walking and diving robots, yet implementation is always straightforward, and never dependent on the hardware itself. ROS Robotics has been the standard introduction to ROS for potential professionals and hobbyists alike since the original edition came out; the second edition adds a gradual introduction to all the goodness available with the Kinetic Kame release. By providing you with step-by-step examples including manipulator arms and flying robots, the authors introduce you to the new features. The book is intensely practical, with space given to theory only when absolutely necessary. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience on controlling robots with the best possible framework.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ROS Robotics By Example Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Creating and building a ROS package


Before we begin to design and build our robot model in simulation, we should create our first ROS package. In Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS, we created a ROS catkin workspace under /home/<username>/catkin_ws. The structure of a catkin workspace looks like this:

catkin_ws/                     -- WORKSPACE
build/                         -- BUILD SPACE
devel/                         -- DEVEL SPACE
src/                           -- SOURCE SPACE
CMakeLists.txt          -- 'Toplevel' CMake file, provided by catkin

Note

Make sure that you have source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash in your .bashrc file, or this command is entered at the terminal window prompt.

We begin by moving to your catkin workspace source directory:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src

Now, let's create our first ROS package, ros_robotics:

$ catkin_create_pkg ros_robotics

This command will create a /ros_robotics directory under the ~/catkin_ws/src directory. The /ros_robotics directory will contain...