Lentin Joseph - Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

Lentin Joseph is an author, entrepreneur, electronics engineer, robotics enthusiast, machine vision expert, embedded programmer, and the founder and CEO of Qbotics Labs (http://www.qboticslabs.com) 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 can communicate with people and reply intelligently and has 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, for 3 years he worked in a start-up company focusing on robotics and image processing. In the meantime, he learned famous robotic software platforms such as Robot Operating System (ROS), V-REP, Actin (a robotic simulation tool), and image processing libraries such as OpenCV, OpenNI, and PCL. He also knows robot 3D designing and embedded programming on Arduino and Tiva Launchpad.

After 3 years of work experience, he started a new company called Qbotics Labs, which mainly focuses on research to build up some great products in domains such as robotics and machine vision. He maintains a personal website (http://www.lentinjoseph.com) and a technology blog called technolabsz (http://www.technolabsz.com). 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 book Learning Robotics Using Python (refer to http://learn-robotics.com to know more) by Packt Publishing. The book was about building an autonomous mobile robot using ROS and OpenCV. The book was launched in ICRA 2015 and was featured in the ROS blog, Robohub, OpenCV, the Python website, and various other such forums.

Lentin was a finalist in the ICRA 2015 challenge, HRATC (http://www2.isr.uc.pt/~embedded/events/HRATC2015/Welcome.html).

I dedicate this book to my parents because they gave me the inspiration to write this book. I also convey my regards to my friends who helped and inspired me to write this book.

Jonathan Cacace was born in Naples, Italy, on December 13, 1987. He received has a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from the University of Naples Federico II. Currently, he is attending a PhD Scholar Course in Information and Automation Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (DIETI) in the same institution. His research is focused on autonomous action planning and execution by mobile robots, high-level and low-level control of UAV platforms, and human-robot interaction with humanoid robots in service task execution. He is the author and coauthor of several scientific publications in the robotics field, published at international conferences and scientific journals.

Jonathan is a member of the PRISMA Laboratory (http://prisma.dieti.unina.it/) of the University of Naples Federico II. With his research group, he is involved in different EU-funded collaborative research projects focused on several topics, such as the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for search and rescue operations or service task execution (http://www.sherpa-project.eu/sherpa/ and http://www.arcas-project.eu/) and the dynamic manipulation of elastic objects using humanoid robotic platforms (http://www.rodyman.eu/).

Ruixiang Du is currently a PhD student studying Robotics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He received his bachelor's degree in Automation from North China Electric Power University in 2011 and a master's degree in Robotics Engineering from WPI in 2013.

Ruixiang has worked on various robotic projects with robot platforms ranging from medical robots, UAV/UGV, to humanoid robots. He was an active member of Team WPI-CMU for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Ruixiang has general interests in robotics and in real-time and embedded systems. His research focus is on the control and motion planning of mobile robots in cluttered and dynamic environments.

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