What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS Hydro, shows the easiest way you must follow in order to have a working installation of ROS. You will see how to install ROS on different platforms, and you will use ROS Hydro throughout the rest of the book. This chapter describes how to make an installation from Debian packages, compile the sources and make installations in virtual machines and ARM CPU.

Chapter 2, ROS Architecture and Concepts, is concerned with the concepts and tools provided by the ROS framework. We will introduce you to nodes, topics, and services, and you will also learn how to use them. Through a series of examples, we will illustrate how to debug a node and visualize the messages published through a topic.

Chapter 3, Visualization and Debug Tools, goes a step further in order to show you powerful tools to debug your nodes and visualize the information that goes through the node's graph along with the topics. ROS provides a logging API that allows you to diagnose node problems easily. In fact, we will see some powerful graphical tools, such as rqt_console and rqt_graph, as well as visualization interfaces, such as rqt_plot and rviz. Finally, this chapter explains how to record and play back messages using rosbag and rqt_bag.

Chapter 4, Using Sensors and Actuators with ROS, literally connects ROS with the real world. This chapter goes through a number of common sensors and actuators that are supported in ROS, such as range lasers, servo motors, cameras, RGB-D sensors, GPS, and much more. Moreover, we explain how to use embedded systems with microcontrollers, similar to the widely known Arduino boards.

Chapter 5, Computer Vision, shows the support for cameras and computer vision tasks in ROS. This chapter starts with drivers available for FireWire and USB cameras so that you can connect them to your computer and capture images. You will then be able to calibrate your camera using the ROS calibration tools. Later, you will be able to use the image pipeline, which is explained in detail. Then, you will see how to use several APIs for vision and integrate OpenCV. Finally, the installation and usage of a visual odometry software is described.

Chapter 6, Point Clouds, in this chapter, we show how to use Point Cloud Library in your ROS nodes. This chapter starts with the basics utilities, such as read or write a PCL snippet and the conversions needed to publish or subscribe to these messages. Then, you will create a pipeline with different nodes to process 3D data, and you will downsample, filter, and search for features using PCL.

Chapter 7, 3D Modeling and Simulation, constitutes one of the first steps in order to implement your own robot in ROS. It shows you how to model a robot from scratch and run it in simulation by using the Gazebo simulator. You will simulate sensors, such as cameras and laser range sensors. This will later allow you to use the whole navigation stack provided by ROS and other tools.

Chapter 8, The Navigation Stack – Robot Setups, is the first of two chapters concerned with the ROS navigation stack. This chapter describes how to configure your robot so that it can be used with the navigation stack. In the same way, the stack is explained, along with several examples.

Chapter 9, The Navigation Stack – Beyond Setups, continues the discussion of the previous chapter by showing how we can effectively make our robot navigate autonomously. It will use the navigation stack intensively for that. This chapter shows the great potential of ROS by using the Gazebo simulator and rviz to create a virtual environment in which we can build a map, localize our robot, and do path planning with obstacle avoidance.

Chapter 10, Manipulation with MoveIt!, is a set of tools for mobile manipulation in ROS. This chapter contains the documentation that you need to install this package. The chapter also contains example demonstrations with robotic arms that use MoveIt! for manipulation tasks, such as grasping, pick and place, or simple motion planning with inverse kinematics.