Preface

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 book 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 book 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 book.

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, such as 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 book, it is our hope that you will have a thorough understanding of the endless possibilities that ROS gives you when developing robotic systems.