In the previous chapter, we discussed the interfacing and simulation of the robotic arm mobile robot to the ROS MoveIt! and Navigation stack. In this chapter, we will look at some of the advanced concepts in ROS, such as the ROS pluginlib, nodelets, and Gazebo plugins. We will discuss the functionalities and applications of each concept and will look at an example to demonstrate it's working. We have used Gazebo plugins in the previous chapters to get the sensor and robot behavior inside the Gazebo simulator. In this chapter, we are going to see how to create it. We will also discuss a modified form of ROS nodes called ROS nodelets. These features in ROS are implemented using a plugin architecture called pluginlib.
In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:
- Understanding pluginlib
- Implementing a sample plugin...