Integrating ROS with Gazebo
Author: Santiago Ricoy
Date last modified: 8/21/2016
Keywords: ROS, Jade, Indigo, PODOGUI, Gazebo, DRC_Hubo, models
This is a guide to using ROS to work with a model of DRC-Hubo in Gazebo.
The purpose of this is to essentially allow us to modify commands before actually giving them to a robot to ensure reliability. This will also make it possible to reference a movement and have the physical robot follow it. In other words, we don't want break the robot, so we first test our code on a simulation.
The following tutorial will require a powerful workstation graphics card, and a fairly fast computer.
I'm currently using (or trying to anyway) an Intel NUC (Intel i5, Intel® Haswell Mobile graphics).
Requirements:
Please be sure to have gone through the installation for:
- Ubuntu 14.04
- Xenomai
- Qt
- ROS (Indigo or Jade; Jade being the latest)
- Gazebo 5
There are tutorials for this created by Keitaro on DASLHub. If those are not completed, the simulations will not function. Commonly, one main issue is the computer not booting into the OS installation running Xenomai.
Because Gazebo can be so resource intensive, some of the problems experienced may actually just be the computer unable to handle the workload.
Note: Be warned that even with all of this in place, you may (will?) run into alternate issues that vary by computer. Some things may be as much of an offshoot as ROS and Gazebo version issues that don't show up until you're trying to run (use ROS Jade and Gazebo 5). You could also encounter dependency problems, or the beloved server connection failure.