icub-gazebo

Preliminary files for simulation of the iCub humanoid robot in Gazebo (meshes courtesy of Joseph Salini - UPMC). Note that these models are compatible only with the Gazebo versions that use SDF 1.5 or higher.

Installation

Install YARP, Gazebo and gazebo-yarp-plugins.

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/robotology/icub-gazebo.git

To let Gazebo know the existence of the models, you can add it to the GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH enviroment variable. You can add a line to the .bashrc file in your home:

if [ -z "$GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH" ]; then
    export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=/home/user/path/to/icub-gazebo
else
    export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=${GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH}:/home/user/path/to/icub-gazebo
fi

Usage

As the iCub Gazebo models uses YARP, remember to start it before starting the simulation, using the following command in a console:

yarpserver 

Then, run Gazebo with the world file included in the world directory:

gazebo ./icub-gazebo/worlds/icub.world

or simply drag and drop the iCub (no hands) or iCub with hands models from the Insert tab in Gazebo.

On Windows no gazebo command is available, so you can instead obtained the same result by executing on one prompt (assuming that the correct enviroment variables have been sed):

gzserver ./icub-gazebo/worlds/icub.world

and in another prompt:

gzclient

FAQ

How to change the model port prefix

All the ports created by the model start with a prefix. This prefix is /icubSim. This can be changed by editing the icub/conf/gazebo_icub_robotname.ini file. For more info on this, see robotology-legacy#8 (comment) .

Model generation

The model store in this repo are actually the result of a process of extraction of kinematics parameters, inertial parameters and meshes from the original CAD files of the iCub robot. There are currently two ways of generating this models:

• The legacy generation system based on kinematics and dynamics parameters hardcoded in the legacy iDyn library, combined with meshes manually extracted from the CAD models, available at https://github.com/robotology-playground/icub-model-generator . This process is used to generate the models for the iCub version 1 model, that is available as icub in this repository.
• The new generation system that converts from actual Creo CAD models of the iCub, described in http://wiki.icub.org/wiki/Creo_Mechanism_to_URDF . This system is currently under testing, and will be used for iCub 2.5 and all the following version of iCub. If you have an iCub and you want to know if a precise model for your system can be extracted from CAD models, please open an new issue in the icub-support repository. At the moment, no model generated with this new system is available in this repository.