Learning Robotics using Python : A new book for teaching ROS using Python

A new book for learning ROS and Robotics. The book Learning Robotics using Python takes a different approach for learning ROS. Most of books are based only about ROS but not mentioning about how we can build a robot and apply ROS on it. This book teaches ROS with the help of Python programming language by building an interactive autonomous mobile robot. 

The book was written by Lentin Joseph who is the CEO/Founder of a Robotic Startup called Qbotics Labs from India. The company is researching on autonomous navigation in mobile robots for an year ago and build a robot prototype having autonomous capability and having extra features like Artificial Intelligence, Speech Recognition and Synthesis, Vision Capabilities. 

The company is planning to release this robot named as Chefbot which is mainly used to serve food in hotel/restaurants. Because of the software used is mostly from open source community, company planning to release robot as open hardware and grow a community for improving the existing robot. Qbotics Labs also serves clients for helping their machines to work as autonomous.

The book uses stable version of ROS ,i.e ROS Indigo and installed on latest Ubuntu L.T.S 14.04.02. The code is also compatible with ROS Jade. The book start with a very basic introduction about Robotics and jumping to the mechanical design of robot using open source tools. After building the successfull 2D and 3D model of the robot, we can see an introduction to ROS and  simulation of Chefbot using ROS and Gazebo. The Chefbot simulation is adapted from Turtlebot simulator. 

After successfull simulation in Gazebo, we can see the hardware designing of robot , i.e the electronics components needed to build the robot and its selection. After selecting proper components, we can see the sensor and actuator interfacing with embedded boards and interfacing embedded boards to ROS using Python. 

The Chefbot have sensors like Kinect, ultrasonics sound sensor, Motor encoders etc. We can see the detail interfacing of each sensor with ROS. The Kinect is interface to ROS and we can see how to work with  depth to pointcloud package 

In addition to that, we can see speech recognition and synthesis in robot using ROS and Python and Implementing some kind of Artificial Intelligence using ROS and Python.

After all interfacing , we can see the final integration both in hardware and software and build the complete robot.

The robot need a controller GUI, so a GUI is building using PyQt and can see debugging using ROS rqt.

After building GUI, we can see the calibration and testing of robot before the deployment of robot.

Also i am happy to say that i could launch the book as part of ICRA 2015 !!!!

The book is available  in PACKT website also Amazon.com