Proposal to add deadband to thruster

[ejalaa12]

🎉 New feature

This PR is a proposal to add a deadband to the thruster system.
Real thrusters have a physical deadband that are not currently simulated.

Summary

This implements a limit below which the thrusters will not spin nor generate thrust.

It adds an additional parameter in the sdf called <deadband>.

• If this tag is not present, the deadband will not be applied.
• otherwise the value in the tag is the absolute value of thrust below which the output will be set to 0.

An additional topic called /enable_deadband is also created to enable or disable the deadband effect during runtime.

Test it

Unit test are coming...

Checklist

• Signed all commits for DCO
• Added tests
• Added example and/or tutorial
• Updated documentation (as needed)
• Updated migration guide (as needed)
• Consider updating Python bindings (if the library has them)
• codecheck passed (See contributing)
• All tests passed (See test coverage)
• While waiting for a review on your PR, please help review another open pull request to support the maintainers

Note to maintainers: Remember to use Squash-Merge and edit the commit message to match the pull request summary while retaining Signed-off-by messages.

[caguero]

Thanks for the contribution! I did a first pass and left a few minor comments.

[ejalaa12]

Hi !
Thanks for the quick review @ahcorde @caguero and sorry for the long delay, I didn't have time to work on this during the past month.
I'll update the PR right now.

[ejalaa12]

I just pushed the changes.

[ejalaa12]

@caguero friendly ping :)

[arjo129]

Any chance we can get a test? Thanks!

[ejalaa12]

Sure I'm working on it and I'll update the PR by next week

[ejalaa12]

@arjo129 just added the unit test for that feature, thanks for reviewing

[arjo129]

I like the idea for the feature. However, this does not compile :( (see my comments and CI). After fixing the syntax errors, I am able to run the tests. There are still some clean ups needed. A bit of documentation on the expectations would help me understand the test better.

Also please sign-off your commits. See: https://github.com/gazebosim/gz-sim/pull/1927/checks?check_run_id=13411768621

[ejalaa12]

@arjo129 I addressed your remarks in the new commit. Btw, should I rebase this PR on gz-sim7 ?

[ejalaa12]

I had to do a force-push to reword my previous commits in order to sign them off

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #1927 (a06cdc2) into gz-sim7 (3dc8c7a) will increase coverage by 0.33%.
Report is 128 commits behind head on gz-sim7.
The diff coverage is 73.61%.

❗ Current head a06cdc2 differs from pull request most recent head 824f8e5. Consider uploading reports for the commit 824f8e5 to get more accurate results

@@             Coverage Diff             @@
##           gz-sim7    #1927      +/-   ##
===========================================
+ Coverage    64.68%   65.01%   +0.33%     
===========================================
  Files          343      354      +11     
  Lines        27430    28699    +1269     
===========================================
+ Hits         17743    18660     +917     
- Misses        9687    10039     +352     

Files Changed	Coverage Δ
include/gz/sim/SdfEntityCreator.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/ServerConfig.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/Util.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/components/Component.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/detail/EntityComponentManager.hh	93.86% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/rendering/MarkerManager.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/rendering/RenderUtil.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
include/gz/sim/rendering/SceneManager.hh	100.00% <ø> (ø)
src/gui/plugins/modules/EntityContextMenu.cc	19.78% <0.00%> (ø)
src/gui/plugins/spawn/Spawn.cc	9.88% <0.00%> (-0.40%)	⬇️
... and 51 more

... and 1 file with indirect coverage changes

[ejalaa12]

@arjo129 did you have time to look at my latest commits ?

[ejalaa12]

@arjo129 friendly ping :)

[arjo129]

Sorry for the (really looong) turn around time. There are still two unresolved threads. Please address those.

[ejalaa12]

Hey @arjo129, NP, thanks for your last comment.
I addressed the unresolved threads.

[arjo129]

Apologies for being obsessive about this, but spotted a few more minor issues. If you're observing flakiness with the test you need only check the last item in the buffer.

[ejalaa12]

@arjo129 no worries, thanks for sticking up with this PR.
I protected the mentioned block with a mutex, and adjusted the pid settings in the world file to make the commented section work.

However I had to rollback the removal of the std::sleep_for, otherwise it breaks the other tests, i'm not entirely sure why. We can probably open a separate issue for this.

[arjo129]

Thanks for iterating on this @ejalaa12. LGTM. We can look into the sleep related issue elsewhere.

[ejalaa12]

Thanks for the merge ! :)
Happy to contribute to this project 👍🏼