Table Of ContentROS Robotics Projects
Build a variety of awesome robots that can see, sense, move,
and do a lot more using the powerful Robot Operating System
Lentin Joseph
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
ROS Robotics Projects
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First published: March 2017
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Credits
Author Copy Editor
Lentin Joseph Madhusudan Uchil
Reviewer Project Coordinator
Ruixiang Du Judie Jose
Commissioning Editor Proofreader
Kartikey Pandey Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Indexer
Namrata Patil Pratik Shirodkar
Content Development Editor Graphics
Amedh Pohad Kirk D'Penha
Technical Editor Production Coordinator
Prashant Chaudhari Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Lentin Joseph is an author, entrepreneur, electronics engineer, robotics enthusiast, machine
vision expert, embedded programmer, and the founder and CEO of Qbotics Labs (http://w
ww.qboticslabs.com) from India.
He completed his bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering at the
Federal Institute of Science and Technology (FISAT), Kerala. For his final year engineering
project, he made a social robot that can interact with people. The project was a huge success
and was mentioned in many forms of visual and print media. The main features of this
robot were that it could communicate with people and reply intelligently and had some
image processing capabilities such as face, motion, and color detection. The entire project
was implemented using the Python programming language. His interest in robotics, image
processing, and Python started with that project.
After his graduation, he worked for three years at a start-up company focusing on robotics
and image processing. In the meantime, he learned to work with famous robotics software
platforms such as Robot Operating System (ROS), V-REP, and Actin (a robotic simulation
tool) and image processing libraries such as OpenCV, OpenNI, and PCL. He also knows
about 3D robot design and embedded programming on Arduino and Tiva Launchpad.
After three years of work experience, he started a new company called Qbotics Labs, which
mainly focuses on research into building some great products in domains such as robotics
and machine vision. He maintains a personal website (http://www.lentinjoseph.com) and
a technology blog called technolabsz (http://www.technolabsz.com). He publishes his
works on his tech blog. He was also a speaker at PyCon2013, India, on the topic Learning
Robotics Using Python.
Lentin is the author of the books Learning Robotics Using Python (http://learn-robotics.c
om) and Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming (http://mastering-ros.com), both by
Packt Publishing. The first book was about building an autonomous mobile robot using
ROS and OpenCV. This book was launched at ICRA 2015 and was featured on the ROS
blog, Robohub, OpenCV, the Python website, and various other such forums. The second
book is on mastering Robot Operating System, which was also launched at ICRA 2016, and
is one of the bestselling books on ROS.
Lentin and his team were also winners of the HRATC 2016 challenge conducted as a part of
ICRA 2016. He was also a finalist in the ICRA 2015 challenge, HRATC (http://www.icra
2016.org/conference/challenges/).
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the readers of my previous two books on ROS
(ROS). Actually, they encouraged me to write one more book on ROS itself.
I would like to thank the Packt Publishing team for giving support for publishing my books.
It may have been a distant dream without you all.
I would especially like to thank Amedh Pohad and Namrata Patil of Packt Publishing, who
guided me during the writing process. Thanks for all your suggestions.
A special thanks to Ruixiang Du and all other technical reviewers for improving the content
and giving good suggestions. Without your suggestions, this book may not have become a
good product.
The most important thing in my life is my family. Without their support, this would not
have been possible. I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, who gave me the
inspiration to write this book. This is my third book about ROS. Thanks for the constant
support.
I would also like to mention my previous company, ASIMOV Robotics, who provided
components for a few projects in this book. Thank you very much.
I thank all the readers who made by previous books successful. I hope you guys also like
this book and make it successful.
About the Reviewer
Ruixiang Du is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI). He currently works in the Systems and Robot Control laboratory with a
research focus on the motion planning and control of autonomous mobile robots. He
received a bachelor's degree in automation from North China Electric Power University in
2011 and a master's degree in robotics engineering from WPI in 2013.
Ruixiang has general interests in robotics and in real-time and embedded systems. He has
worked on various robotic projects, with robot platforms ranging from medical robots and
unmanned aerial/ground vehicles to humanoid robots. He was a member of Team WPI-
CMU for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1
Chapter 1: Getting Started with ROS Robotics Application Development
8
Getting started with ROS 9
ROS distributions 10
Supported operating systems 11
Robots and sensors supported by ROS 13
Why ROS 15
Fundamentals of ROS 16
The filesystem level 17
The computation graph level 18
The ROS community level 20
Communication in ROS 21
ROS client libraries 22
ROS tools 23
Rviz (ROS Visualizer) 23
rqt_plot 24
rqt_graph 25
Simulators of ROS 25
Installing ROS kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 26
Getting started with the installation 27
Configuring Ubuntu repositories 28
Setting up source.list 29
Setting up keys 30
Installing ROS 30
Initializing rosdep 30
Setting the ROS environment 31
Getting rosinstall 31
Setting ROS on VirtualBox 32
Setting the ROS workspace 34
Opportunities for ROS in industries and research 36
Questions 38
Summary 39
Chapter 2: Face Detection and Tracking Using ROS, OpenCV and
Dynamixel Servos
40
Overview of the project 41
