Section 1, Effective Robotics Programming with ROS, Third Edition gives you a comprehensive review of ROS, the Robot Operating System framework, which is used nowadays by hundreds of research groups and companies in the robotics industry. More importantly, ROS is also the painless entry point to robotics for nonprofessionals and students. This section will guide you through the installation process of ROS, and soon enough, you will be playing with the basic tools and understanding the different elements of the framework.
The content of the section can be followed without any special devices, and each chapter comes with a series of source code examples and tutorials that you can run on your own computer. This is the only thing you need to follow the section. However, we also show you how to work with hardware so that you can connect your algorithms with the real world. Special care has been taken in choosing devices that are affordable for amateur users, but at the same time, the most typical sensors or actuators in robotics research are covered.
Finally, the potential of ROS is illustrated with the ability to work with whole robots in a real or simulated environment. You will learn how to create your own robot and integrate it with a simulation by using the Gazebo simulator. From here, you will have the chance to explore the different aspects of creating a robot, suchas perceiving the world using computer vision or point cloud analysis, navigating through the environment using the powerful navigation stack, and even being able to control robotic arms to interact with your surroundings using the MoveIt! package. By the end of the section, it is our hope that you will have a thorough understanding of the endless possibilities that ROS gives you when developing robotic systems.
Section 2, Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming is an advanced guide of ROS that is very suitable for readers who already have a basic knowledge in ROS. ROS is widely used in robotics companies, universities, and robotics research institutes for designing, building, and simulating a robot model and interfacing it into real hardware. ROS is now an essential requirement for Robotic engineers; this guide can help you acquire knowledge of ROS and can also help you polish your skills in ROS using interactive
examples. Even though it is an advanced guide, you can see the basics of ROS in the fist chapter to refresh the concepts. It also helps ROS beginners. The section mainly focuses on the advanced concepts of ROS, such as ROS Navigation stack, ROS MoveIt!, ROS plugins, nodelets, controllers, ROS Industrial, and so on.
You can work with the examples in the section without any special hardware; however, in some sections you can see the interfacing of I/O boards, vision sensors, and actuators to ROS. To work with this hardware, you will need to buy it.
The section starts with an introduction to ROS and then discusses how to build a robot model in ROS for simulating and visualizing. After the simulation of robots using Gazebo, we can see how to connect the robot to Navigation stack and MoveIt!. In addition to this, we can see ROS plugins, controllers, nodelets, and interfacing of I/O boards and vision sensors. Finally, we can see more about ROS Industrial and troubleshooting and best practices in ROS.
Section 3, ROS Robotics Projects is a practical guide to learning ROS by making interesting projects using it. The section assumes that you have some knowledge of ROS.
However, if you do not have any experience with ROS, you can still learn from this section. The first chapter is dedicated to absolute beginners. ROS is widely used in robotics companies, universities, and robot research labs for designing and programming robots. If you would like to work in the robotics software domain or if you want to have a career as a robotics software engineer, this section is perfect for you.
The basic aim of this section is to teach ROS through interactive projects. The projects that we are discussing here can also be reused in your academic or industrial projects. This section handles a wide variety of new technology that can be interfaced with ROS. For example, you will see how to build a self-driving car prototype, how to build a deep-learning application using ROS, and how to build a VR application in ROS. These are only a few highlighted topics; in addition, you will find some 15 projects and applications using ROS and its libraries.
You can work with any project after meeting its prerequisites. Most of the projects can be completed without many dependencies. We are using popular and available hardware components to build most of the projects. So this will help us create almost all of these projects without much difficulty.