Acoustic beacon - range and bearing

[osrf-migration]

Original report (archived issue) by Brian Bingham (Bitbucket: brian_bingham).

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This is a proposal - would welcome improvements and comments.

As a first prototype, having the following simple capability would provide teams with a tool to prototype the way their autonomy deals with underwater acoustic beacons used in RobotX.

• Provides a simulated measurement of the range, azimuth and elevation between a specific model link and a fixed point (defined as location in gazebo coordinates)
• with user configured uncertainty in each of the three dimensions
• at a user configured update rate (0.5 - 2 Hz)

Teams have to develop this functionality using a variety of methods (e.g., hydrophone arrays and beam forming), but we can use a higher abstraction for the purposes of developing autonomy.

The description above is a sufficient first step. A couple of next-step extensions to increase fidelity, might include

• Uncertainty model should include Gaussian uncertainty, but could also include a probability of an outlier and/or dropout - which is typical of acoustic means.
• Ranges are subject to line-of-sight visibility (probably too detailed for RobotX)

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Brian Bingham (Bitbucket: brian_bingham).

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• Edited issue description

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Carlos Agüero (Bitbucket: caguero, GitHub: caguero).

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See pull request #48 pull request #56.

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Carlos Agüero (Bitbucket: caguero, GitHub: caguero).

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• changed milestone from "0.3" to "0.4"

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Brian Bingham (Bitbucket: brian_bingham).

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• changed state from "new" to "resolved"

Preliminary capability in https://osrf-migration.github.io/vrx-gh-pages/#!/osrf/vmrc/pull-requests/56/