Realistic implementation of ultrasound sensor in gazebo_range plugging?

Hello,

I am trying to simulate ultrasound sensor in gazebo. I have found in the gazebopkg the gazeborange plugging. This plugging supplies the radiation_type field where you can choose ultrasound emission type if you want to simulate this sensor behaviour. But I wonder whether the behaviour in the simulation is realistic or not . It is well-known that when the ultrasound sensor cone hits against a surface and this one is not perpendicular some problems appear to get the reflected wave. Usually ultrasound hitting against a plate with 45º-degrees angle doesn't see the surface. So and in summary my question are:

Has the plugging implemented this behaviour?

If the answer is not. How difficult would it be to implement it?

Thanks a lot.

Asked by carlos.tubio on 2016-02-17 03:03:00 UTC

Comments

Ideas anyone?

Asked by asdfjkl on 2016-05-26 19:06:29 UTC

Answers

The ultrasound sensor in Gazebo is only a rough approximation of sonar. A cone is "collided" with objects in the world. The closest collision point, if any, is used to compute the range returned by the sonar.

We'd love help improving this sonar model. Take a look at the source code .

Asked by nkoenig on 2016-05-27 10:40:11 UTC

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Hello @carlos.tubio

I'm having the same issue. It seems that simulating an ultrasound sensor with a tag, gazebo_range plugging and an ultrasound radiation type, doesn't follow the behavior of a real ultrasound sensor. I tested it putting a box and a cylinder in different orientations relative to the ultrasound rays and always the range value was the closest collision point.

Now @nkoenig, using the tag available in the SDF format, I have found two problems. The first one is that the sonar sensor -when the radius is big enough- detects the collision with the ground, this doesn't make sense. And the second one is that there is no plugging to communicate the range value with ROS.

So, what did you do? Does anyone know how to implement a sonar sensor that have the real wave behaviour and a plugin to communicate with ROS?

Asked by imstevenpm on 2017-09-26 11:02:56 UTC