Robot Operating System

19EEE354 – Introduction to Robotics

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ROS Features
• Open-source software
• Freely available for commercial application
• All the Transforms of the robot are tracked in ROS
• No need to find the Forward kinematics equations to find the position of the
end-effector
• Robot description is provided in URDF format to ROS
• tf or tf2 module keeps track of all the transforms of the robot from base to
end-effector
• There are IK slovers to solve Inverse kinematics problems
• There are many plugins that solves the Ik problem for simple to complex
robotic manipulators
• Few Ik solvers are IKfast(Analytical Solver) and kdl (Numerical Solver)

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ROS Features
• Moveit - path planning and obstacle avoidance
• Set of packages and tools for doing motion planning, manipulation, 3D
perception, kinematics, collision checking, control, and navigation in ROS
• ROS navigation stack - differential drive robots
• Contains ready to-use navigation algorithms which can be used in mobile
robots, especially for differential wheeled robots
• Robot move autonomously in given environment using ROS navigation
• ROS control package - control the actuators of the robots
• Provides built-in PID control loop with joint limits to make the motion of the
robot swift and smooth
• Open CV Interfaced to ROS
• Vision and perception tasks
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ROS Features
• Rviz and Gazebo - tools to visualize robot
• Gazebo
• Simulation environment where an exact replica of the robot can be implemented with all
physical properties(like weight, inertia, collisions, etc)
• Code can be tested in simulation first before testing it on real hardware
• Rviz
• Debugging tool which visualizes what a real/simulated robot is experiencing (like joint
motion, vision, etc)
• ROS is light
• Can run on embedded boards like Rasberry pi

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Working with ROS
• ROS works with Linux operating system
• ROS versions: ROS Noetic Ninjemys, ROS Melodic Morenia, ROS Lunar
Loggerhead, ROS Kinetic, etc.,
• Following explanation is based on ROS kinetic
• ROS uses catkin to build the ROS projects
• First step is to create a catkin workspace
• Following folders are created once workspace is ready
• source space (/src) – contains packages for robotic projects which contains
the source code files
• build space (/build)
• development space (/devel)
• ROS packages can be written in C++ or python
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ROS Node
• An executable program which contains a part of code of the robot
• A robotic application can have more than one node
• Node to compute inverse kinematics
• Node to send commands to the actuators
• Node to get the joint angle values from sensors and etc
• All these nodes communicates with each other through messages
• There is a Master node running which will have all the address of the
nodes running in the system
• It is Master node's responsibility to connect the Nodes with each
other to start communication
• Modes of communication: topics, services and Actions
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 ROS Node – Registration
• Master allows all other ROS pieces of
software (Nodes) to find and talk to each
other
Send this sensor data to that computer at
127.0.0.1
✓ One can program Node 1 to send messages to
Node 2

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ROS Node – Topic
• Topics are named buses over which nodes exchange messages
• Commonly used mode of communication for nodes in ROS
• Publisher node → Broadcasts a message with a topic name
• Subscriber node → A node that want to receive the message will subscribe to a
specific topic name
• This mode of communication is unidirectional
• The nodes are unaware of who they are communicating with
• A publisher will keep on publishing the data even if there is no/multiple subscriber
• Subscriber will keep listening to the topic if there is no/ multiple publishers
• It is responsibility of the ROS master to establish the connection between the
publisher and subscriber when they are on the same topic

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 ROS Node – Topic
• Consider a camera on a Robot
• Images from the camera must be available to both the
Robot itself and to another laptop
• All Nodes have registered with the Master
• Master: lookup table where all the nodes go to find where exactly
to send messages
• During registration, the Camera Node states that it will Publish a
Topic called /image_data
• Both of the other Nodes register that they are Subscribed to the
Topic /image_data
• once the Camera Node receives some data from the Camera, it
sends the /image_data message directly to the other two nodes
(via TCP)

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ROS Node – Service
• Sometimes a node wants to perform/execute a task or provide data when asked
for
• This requires a mode of communication where there is a response to the request
(Technically these are RCP (Remote procedure calls))
• A node providing service is known as Service Server node
• A node asking for service is known as Service Client node
• A ROS node offers a service under a string name, and a client calls the service by
sending the request message and awaiting the reply
• There can be only one Service server node with a unique service name
• The same service can be requested by one/multiple client nodes

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ROS Node – Service
• Image Processing Node can request data
from the Camera Node at a specific time
• ROS implements Services
• A Node can register a specific service with
the ROS Master, just as it registers its
messages
• The Image Processing Node first requests
/image_data, the Camera Node gathers
data from the Camera, and then sends the
reply

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ROS Node – Services
Drawback
• When service is requested by the client, the request is assigned in the
global callbacks queue
• If this service for any reason takes long time to complete the task, it
may have side effect on the other nodes
• Therefore, services should never be used for longer running
processes, in particular processes that might be required to preempt
if exceptional situations occur
• however, if the service takes a long time to execute, the user might
want the ability to cancel the request during execution or get periodic
feedback about how the request is progressing
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ROS Node – Action
• actionlib package provides tools to create servers that execute long-running goals
and that can be preempted if required
• It also provides a client interface in order to send requests to the server
• Actions are used for longer tasks like execution of robot motions or perception –
for real world actions
• Analogy: Ordering food online from a restaurant through a mobile App
• Mobile app is the Action Server
• Person who has ordered the food is the Action Client
• Delivery boy at your doorstep is the Goal
• The current location of the delivery boy is the Feedback
• Option to cancel order is the Preemption of goal

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Launch File
• A robot project can have N nodes
• To run all the nodes in a project, one may need to open N terminals
all at once to realise a robot – Difficult
• Launch file will come in handy
• Launch file is an xml file format which can be used to run multiple
nodes, load variables into ROS parameter server, etc
• One can even include another launch file in existing launch file

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URDF
• Universal Robotic Description Format
• An XML file format used in ROS to describe all elements of a robot
and their properties
• Contains information about the robot's physical construction, geometry,
dynamics, etc
• URDF will tell ROS how the links and joints are connected, type of
joints, the dimensions of links, mass and inertia of the links, etc

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Scripts of URDF file for the model shown on the left

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tf2
• Almost everything in robotics is concerned with where things are -
either relative to the robot itself or relative to other things
• Whenever a robot wants to interact with the real world, it will need
to know where the things it wants to interact with are
• Each link of robot is assigned with a coordinate frame from the base
to the end-effector
• These frames will tell us the position and orientation of the frame
w.r.t to other frames
• The coordinates of these frames are determined using the
Transformation matrices
• These frame coordinates need to be updated whenever either the
robot moves, or other things move
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tf2
• The tf2 package enables ROS nodes to keep track of coordinate
frames and transform data between coordinate frames
• A node that knows a transform between frames will publishes it to a
tf ROS topic
• Nodes that are interested use tf to subscribe to the transforms
• tf can then efficiently compose the net transform between requested
frames
• Tf package replaces manual derivation of the transformation matrices
and forward kinematics equations of the robot

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Usage of tf
• Our part is to write the URDF file of our robot and and a node to
publishing the joint sensors data continuously on "/joint_states" topic
• Load this URDF file in parameter server, run node publishing joint
positions data and run the robot_state_publisher node
• The robot_state_publisher will receive the joint positions data from
"/joint_states" topic, compute the transformations of all the frames
and publish those transforms on "/tf" and "/tf_static" topics

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Rviz
• Rviz (ROS visualizer) is powerful 3D visualization tool that allows to
view the robot's sensors and internal state
• Rviz uses the URDF file to load the designed robot in the tool
• It can also display live representations of sensor values coming over
ROS Topics including camera data, point cloud data, infrared distance
measurements, sonar data, and more
• Using Rviz one can
• Check our path planning or collision checking algorithms by inserting objects
• Trace the motion of any link of the robot
• Use interactive markers to move the robot and do lot things

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Movelt Quickstart in RViz 22
Robot navigating to a location in ROS 23
Reference
• Ros 101: Intro to the Robot Operating System (no date) Robohub.
Available at: https://robohub.org/ros-101-intro-to-the-robot-
operating-system/ (Accessed: November 13, 2022).
• Basics of ROS: Ros Robotics (no date) Home. Available at:
https://www.rosroboticslearning.com/basics-of-ros (Accessed:
November 13, 2022).

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