Realistic implementation of ultrasound sensor in gazebo_range plugging?

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Hello @carlos.tubio

I'm having the same issue. It seems that simulating an ultrasound sensor with a <ray> 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 <sonar> 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?

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 .