Hello,

i'm new to Gazebo, but i've worked a lot with ROS, PCL and Ogre 3D. I've installed Gazebo on Kubuntu, the example tutorial on how to create plugins is compiling and working (http://gazebosim.org/tutorials/?tut=plugins_hello_world).

What i want to achieve: Now i want to write a meshing algorihm that works as fast as possible. The algorithm should get some points in 3d that describe a cable or tube (~30 points on a line) and create a 3d mesh to simulte that cable/tube.

My idea: I think a good way to achieve this would be to create joints/links at the given 3d points and use simple cylinders (collision objects) between them to get a mesh representation of the cable/tube for further simulations with Gazebo.

As i'm new to Gazebo i'm not sure if the following is the right way to implement the algorithm: 1. Creating a Gazebo plugin 2. Using boost::PropertyTree to create a sdf-file that writes all the necessary data to a sdf-file that describes the 3d mesh of the cable/tube (~30 joints/links with cylinders/collision objects between them) 3. Created sdf-file can be used for import and simulation in Gazebo.

I don't really need the mesh in a sdf-file, but maybe it is a good way to get the created mesh in Gazebo for further simulations? A more direct way in code would also be fine.

I hope somebody can give me some feedback if this is the right way to do or is there a better solution?

Thank you very much