Chapter 7. Programming Vision Sensors Using Python and ROS

In the previous chapter, we have seen some of the robotic sensors used in our robot and its interfacing with the Launchpad board. In this chapter, we will mainly discuss vision sensors and its interface used in our robot.

The robot we are designing will have a 3D sensor and we can interface it with vision libraries such as OpenCV, OpenNI, and Point Cloud Library (PCL). Some of the applications of the 3D vision sensor in our robot are autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, object detection, people tracking, and so on.

We will also discuss the interfacing of vision sensors and image processing libraries with ROS. In the last section of the chapter, we will see a navigational algorithm for our robot called SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) and its implementation using a 3D sensor, ROS, and image processing libraries.

In the first section, we will see some 2D and 3D vision sensors available on the market that...