gazebo_ros_3dx

This is a ROS package containing a URDF model for the Pioneer 3DX, which uses the Hector sensors package to publish sonar data and also exports a camera.

It also subscribes to two topics, leftmotor and rightmotor (handled by remapping in world.launch, so to get these to work you'll need to launch with that file or modify that file) (or work out how to do it yourself!)

To use the thing

• put it all into your Catkin workspace as a package and make the workspace.
• remove the last node from launch/sim.launch (the "diamondpublish" node)
• remove the "lightsensor" node from defs/jcf.xacro (which uses my lightsensor library to publish a light sensor based on simulated camera data)
• start roscore
• run roslaunch gazebo_ros_3dx sim.launch gui:=true to start Gazebo, set up the world, add the robot and start the Gazebo GUI.

What's where

• defs/jcf.xacro contains the definition of the robot using meshes from the meshes directory.
• defs/sonar_sensor.urdf.xacro contains a definition of a sonar sensor macro, using the Hector sensor packages.
• defs/sonar_pos.urdf.xacro contains invocations of the above macro to position the sonars on the robot.
• defs/sonarpos.ang is an Angort program to generate the sonar position Xacro file above.
• config/p3dx_control.yaml contains parameter definitions for the simulated motor con- trollers.
• launch/sim.launch will launch Gazebo and a simulated robot with all sensors and actuators connected to ROS. It uses world.launch to invoke Gazebo and load the appropriate world. It will also start diamondpublish.py. You probably won't want that, so remove it.
• scripts/diamondpublish.py will read the robot location from Gazebo and republish it to Diamond Apparatus (my comms system) - ignore it.
• world.launch is invoked from sim.launch and starts Gazebo with a world. It also remaps the default hardware controller command nodes to leftmotor and rightmotor.
• worlds/foo.sdf is the default world loaded, generated by...
• sdfgen.ang is a handy Angort library for building worlds. You can also ignore this unless you want to use Angort to build SDF files. I wouldn't.

The lightsensor gazebo package contains the light sensor simulator, and also the LightSensor message used by both the real and simulated sensor.

Dependencies

The system absolutely needs

• hector_sensors_gazebo - a ROS package that sets up simulated sensors for Gazebo

to make the sensors work. It also uses the following packages of my own, which you don't need:

• https://github.com/jimfinnis/DiamondApparatus (handles non-ROS comms)
• https://github.com/jimfinnis/lightsensor_gazebo (generates a simulated omnidirectional light sensor)
• https://github.com/jimfinnis/angort (my weird programming language that's used to generate the world .sdf file)