Making our robot base intelligent

Let's begin by making our robot base autonomous or intelligent. Our robot base needs to understand the environment and move around the environment with ease. We shall do this using Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). SLAM has been a research problem for almost a decade but ROS has good open source packages that can help us map and localize the robot in an environment. We shall add the necessary sensors to the robot, configure the available ROS packages, and make the robot maneuver autonomously in the environment. Let's start by adding the laser sensor.

Adding a laser sensor

To make the robot understand the environment, we shall make use of a laser scanner sensor. A laser...