Chapter 4. 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 small programs in ROS and manage them, we are going to work with sensors and actuators—things that can interact with the real world.

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

In this chapter, we will deal with the following topics:

• Cheap and common sensors for your projects
• 3D sensors, such as Kinect and laser rangefinders
• Using Arduino to connect more sensors and actuators

We know that it is impossible to explain all the types of sensors in this chapter. For this reason, we have selected some of the most commonly used ones and those that are affordable to most users—regular, sporadic, or amateur.

Sensors and actuators can be organized into different categories: rangefinders, cameras, pose estimation devices...