Ramkumar Gandhinathan - ROS Robotics Projects, 2nd Edition

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First published: March 2017
Second edition: December 2019

Production reference: 1181219

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ISBN 978-1-83864-932-6

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Ramkumar Gandhinathan is a roboticist and researcher by profession. He started building robots in the sixth grade and has been in the robotics field for over 15 years through personal and professional connections. He has personally built over 80 robots of different types. With 7 years' overall professional experience (4 years full-time and 3 years part-time/internship) in the robotics industry, he has 5 years of ROS experience. As a part of his professional career, he has built over 15 industrial robot solutions using ROS. He is also fascinated by building drones and is a drone pilot. His research interests and passion are in the fields of SLAM, motion planning, sensor fusion, multi-robot communication, and systems integration.

Lentin Joseph is an author, roboticist, and robotics entrepreneur from India. He runs a robotics software company called Qbotics Labs in Kochi, Kerala. He has 8 years of experience in the robotics domain, primarily in ROS, OpenCV, and PCL.

He has authored several books on ROS, namely Learning Robotics Using Python, first and second edition; Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming, first and second edition; ROS Robotics Projects, first edition; and Robot Operating System for Absolute Beginners.

He completed his master's degree in robotics and automation in India and has worked at Robotics Institute, CMU, USA. He is also a TEDx speaker.

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Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most popular robotics middleware and is used by universities and industries for robot-specific applications. Ever since its introduction, many robots have been introduced to the market and users have been able to use them with ease within their applications. One of its main draws is its open source nature. ROS does not need a user to reinvent the wheel; instead, standardizing robot operations and applications is simple.

This book is an upgrade to the previous edition and introduces you to newer ROS packages, interesting projects, and some added features. This book targets projects in the latest (at the time of writing) ROS distributionROS Melodic Morenia with Ubuntu Bionic version 18.04.

Here, you will understand how robots are used in industries and will learn the step-by-step procedure of building heterogeneous robot solutions. Unlike the service call and action features in ROS, you will be introduced to cooler techniques that let robots handle intricate tasks in a smart way. This knowledge should pave the way to far more intelligent and self-performing autonomous robots. Additionally, we will also introduce ROS-2, so you can learn the differences between this version and the previous ROS version and find help in choosing a specific middleware for your application.