ROS Robotics Projects

Build a variety of awesome robots that can see, sense, move, and do a lot more using the powerful Robot Operating System

About This Book

• Create and program cool robotic projects using powerful ROS libraries
• Work through concrete examples that will help you build your own robotic systems of varying complexity levels
• This book provides relevant and fun-filled examples so you can make your own robots that can run and work

Who This Book Is For

This book is for robotic enthusiasts and researchers who would like to build robot applications using ROS. If you are looking to explore advanced ROS features in your projects, then this book is for you. Basic knowledge of ROS, GNU/Linux, and programming concepts is assumed.

What You Will Learn

• Create your own self-driving car using ROS
• Build an intelligent robotic application using deep learning and ROS
• Master 3D object recognition
• Control a robot using virtual reality and ROS
• Build your own AI chatter-bot using ROS
• Get to know all about the autonomous navigation of robots using ROS
• Understand face detection and tracking using ROS
• Get to grips with teleoperating robots using hand gestures
• Build ROS-based applications using Matlab and Android
• Build interactive applications using TurtleBot

In Detail

Robot Operating System is one of the most widely used software frameworks for robotic research and for companies to model, simulate, and prototype robots. Applying your knowledge of ROS to actual robotics is much more difficult than people realize, but this title will give you what you need to create your own robotics in no time!

This book is packed with over 14 ROS robotics projects that can be prototyped without requiring a lot of hardware. The book starts with an introduction of ROS and its installation procedure. After discussing the basics, you'll be taken through great projects, such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find ROS robotics applications for beginner, intermediate, and expert levels inside!

This book will be the perfect companion for a robotics enthusiast who really wants to do something big in the field.

Style and approach

This book is packed with fun-filled, end-to-end projects on mobile, armed, and flying robots, and describes the ROS implementation and execution of these models.

Lentin Joseph is an author, entrepreneur, electronics engineer, robotics enthusiast, machine vision expert, embedded programmer, and the founder and CEO of Qbotics Labs 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 and a technology blog called technolabsz. 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 (learn-robotics.com) and Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming (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