Skip to content

3. ROS: Robot Operating System

Ivar Eriksen edited this page Dec 8, 2017 · 1 revision

ROS

Basic ROS programs

(Robot Operating System) is collection of tools for controlling robots. We are using ROS Kinetic along with some with ROS Industrial packages. See http://www.ros.org/ and http://rosindustrial.org/ for more information.

is a physics simulator that has support for ROS. Gazebo 2.0 is the default version for ROS Indigo, but this can be updated if needed.

is a robot visualizer. If you don’t need physics simulations rviz is a better option than Gazebo. See http://wiki.ros.org/rviz for more information

is used to start ROS launch scripts. To automate parameter loading and start of ROS nodes, most packages comes with several launch files to automate this process.

$ roslaunch <package> <launch file>

is a software collection for mobile manipulation. See the MoveIt! webpage at http://moveit.ros.org/ for more information.

ROS Tutorials

To get a better understanding of how ROS works, it is recommended to at least read through the following tutorials

Test model in rviz

rviz can be used with together with joint_state_publisher to show and test the robot models.

$ roslaunch robotlab_support test_robotlab.launch 

ROS MoveIt! with fake controller

To get to know MoveIt! and test programs, it is possible to use a fake controller with the robots. Launching MoveIt! with the fake controller is accomplished with a single command.

$ roslaunch robotlab_moveit_config moveit_planning_execution.launch

Gazebo and MoveIt!

Gazebo can be used with MoveIt!. To test the environment, the following commands can be used

$ roslaunch robotlab_gazebo robotlab_gazebo.launch % Start gazebo
$ roslaunch robotlab_moveit_config moveit_planning_execution_gazebo.launch % Start MoveIt! with gazebo

Depending on the usage scenario, you might have to create new files to suit your needs.


  1. Skip if you don’t plan to use Gazebo

Clone this wiki locally