Running and controlling a simulated robot
In this section, we explore the use of TurtleSim, a lightweight and user-friendly tool within ROS for simulating a robot’s movements and behaviors. TurtleSim serves as an excellent educational resource, especially for beginners in ROS, to understand basic concepts such as node interactions, message passing, and simple robotic commands.
By using TurtleSim, we will learn how to create a ROS node to control a virtual robot. We will control the TurtleSim robot with MQTT messages. In the upcoming chapters, we will use what we learn here to convert our robot into a physical robot we will call A.R.E.S.
We’ll begin by launching a TurtleSim node within Ubuntu and then control it using a separate ROS node.
Launching and testing TurtleSim
As mentioned, TurtleSim is designed to help new users familiarize themselves with ROS functionalities such as nodes, topics, and services through a simple interface. By running TurtleSim, we...