ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Using Sensors and Actuators with ROS

When you think of a robot, you would probably think of a human-sized one with arms, a lot of sensors, and a wide field of locomotion systems.

Now that we know how to write programs in ROS and that we know how to create robot models and simulate their behavior, we are going to work with real sensors and actuators-things that can interact with the real world. In the first section, we are going to learn how to control a DIY robot platform using ROS. Then, we are going to see how to interface different sensors and actuators that you can typically find in robotics laboratories.

You can find a wide list of devices supported by ROS at http://www.ros.org/wiki/Sensors.

Sensors and actuators can be organized into ...