GMapping is a commonly used SLAM package in ROS. Here are some steps to perform GMapping in ROS: Step 1: Create a package for this. Make a “launch” folder inside the package folder. Step 2: Create a launch file to run the “gmapping” node. Set the parameters of the “gmapping” node inside this launch file. …

A post on fusing the wheel odometry and IMU data using robot_localization package in ROS can be found here: Now we are going to add GPS data to the wheel odometry and IMU data. These three measurements are going to be fused by using robot_localization package. GPS provides the position of a robot with respect …

Accurate robot localization is very important for robot SLAM and navigation. Using only wheel odometry typically does not provide accurate localization of a mobile ground robot because of the uncertainty resulting from the wheels’ slip and drift. For this reason, it is quite common to fuse the wheel odometry data and the IMU data. In …

Navigation can be 2D or 3D. For a ground mobile robot, the navigation is typically 2D since the mobile robot does not have a degree of freedom in the vertical direction. Even for other types of mobile robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the navigation can be simplified to 2D. This is performed by …

Here are some steps to use MoveIt for your robot: Step 1: Make sure you meet the prerequisites, including: Having URDF of your robot Having ros_control and friends installed Having all required MoveIt packages installed Step 2: Run MoveIt Setup Assistant. This is a convenient GUI-based tool to setup the configuration of your MoveIt package. …

MoveIt (previously MoveIt!) is a very popular, and probably the most popular, ROS package for motion planning, particularly motion planning of manipulators. Although MoveIt is commonly used for manipulators, it is sometimes used for other robot types, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). For example: https://www.wilselby.com/research/ros-integration/3d-mapping-navigation/ and https://github.com/wilselby/ROS_quadrotor_simulator https://github.com/tahsinkose/hector-moveit https://www.theconstructsim.com/robotigniteacademy_learnros-3/ros-courses-library/ros-courses-programming-drones-ros/ The concept of MoveIt can be …

A very common ROS controller used to control a mobile ground robot is diff_drive_controller. This controller can be used for two types of mobile ground robots: Mobile ground robot with two wheels using differential drive Mobile ground robot with four wheels using skid steering This controller is basically a velocity controller as it commands the …

There are two ROS controllers commonly used to control manipulators: effort_controllers/JointPositionController This is commonly used to control individual joints of a manipulator. The configuration YAML file of the controller, let’s call it my_controller.yaml, looks like this: A launch file to launch the controller looks like this: To command a joint position from the terminal, the …

The Big Picture The following shows the big picture of how to use ros_control with either simulation or a real robot. It can be seen in the picture that the class “hardware_interface::RobotHW” should be implemented in a hardware interface node when ros_control is used with a real robot. On the other hand, the class “hardware_interface::RobotHWSim” …

In general, there are several types of control software. Some of them are available out of the box whereas some others are those you may write by yourselves. ros_control is among the out-of-the-box control software you can directly use (so that you don’t need to write one from scratch) which is compatible with third-party packages …