As the title hints, this book provides practical recipes of building robot arms from scratch. It covers all the aspects involved in a whole robotic system and shows how to build your own robot arm(s) in the ROS environment.Unlike regular textbooks, this book emphasizes robot system development with a real robot platform (hex7bot) closely, and the most examples or code are directly from that project. The chapters in this book are also arranged as a staged development of the project: from general system-level design or modeling to detailed software/hardware model designs, from single arm to dual-arm, from classic control to advanced topics (i.e., deep learning).
Throughout this book, you will learn the following:
- Chapter 2: Get started: Let get your first robot arm set up and run with sample launch files.
- Chapter 3: Set up your workspace: Get familiar with the robot programming environment and the ROS framework for the robot arm. Meanwhile, set up your robot software development environment.
- Chapter 4: Review robotics concepts and robot models in the ROS environment. Some essential concepts, such as robot frames, DH parameters to characterize robot arm kinematics, and `URDF` (Unified Robot Description Format)\index{URDF}
- Chapter 5: Robot Kinematics. Introduction of 6-DOF robot arm forward kinematics and inverse kinematics.
- Chapter 6: Software Architecture: Take the software architecture developed on `Hex7Bot as an example, and illustrate how software modules are organized and how to design an open architecture software framework under the ROS environment.
- Chapter 7: Teleop: Learn how to control the robot arm over joysticks, keyboard, as well as remote controlling robot arms by cost-effective portable devices over a Web App.
- Chapter 8: Robot Controller: This chapter dissects `ros_control` architecture and explores how it works and is designed.
- Chapter 9: Hardware Communication: It mainly focuses on how to modularize internal robot hardware components and standardize HMI interface by IPC - the ROS messages extension.
- Chapter 10: Visualization and Simulation. Learn how to visualize, simulate, debug your robot arm within Rviz, Gazebo and MoveIt!.
- Chapter 11: Build Dual Arms: With one robot arm system (hardware and software framework) complete, we continue exploring building dual arms for dual-arm coordination tasks.
- Chapter 12: Dual-arm perception with the depth camera. This chapter discusses the integration of a 3D depth camera, i.e., the Realsense D435 camera into a dual-arm system.
- Chapter 13: Robot tracking under vision guidance: Develop an application to control the left/right arm to grasp an object based on 3D camera localization.
- Chapter 14: Deep Learning: Explore and track the latest AI technologies and seek some solutions with popular deep learning models.
- Chapter 15: Tips and Tricks: Shares some tips on debugging and troubleshooting, common pitfalls, as well as useful utility tools and methods during robot system & software development.
