The main aim of this book is to teach you how to build an autonomous mobile robot from scratch. The robot will be programmed using ROS and its operations will be simulated using a simulator called Gazebo. You will also see the robot's mechanical design, circuit design, embedded programming, and high-level software programming using ROS in the upcoming chapters.

In this chapter, we will start with the basics of ROS, how to install it, how to write a basic application using ROS and Python, and the basics of Gazebo. This chapter will be the foundation of your autonomous robotics project. If you are already aware of the basics of ROS, and already have it installed on your system, you may skip this chapter. However, you can still go through this chapter later to refresh your memory as to the basics of ROS.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to ROS
• Installing ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04.3
• Introducing, installing, and testing Gazebo

Let's start programming robots using Python and Robot Operating System (ROS).