Gazebo 8 installation with ROS integration
I'll start with saying that this may be a newbie question, but the current installation of Gazebo has me confused.
What I actually want to achieve is to 'easily' setup gazebo so that I can add a sensor to an animated actor model, and record the sensor data for post-processing in Matlab. I presumed the easiest way to record sensor data would be by using rosbag record, since this is mentioned in the logging tutorial.
Since the latest version is Gazebo 8 (which is installed with the one-liner
curl -ssL http://get.gazebosim.org | sh
, and the animated model tutorial page also only refers to Gazebo 8, I presume that Gazebo 8 is the way to move forward.
However, the only mention of ROS integration for Gazebo 8 I can find on the tutorial page explaining which ROS version to use for which version of Gazebo, only mentions the following:
Gazebo 8.x series
The OSRF repository provides -gazebo8- versions of ROS/Kinetic or ROS/Lunar gazebo wrappers (gazebo8_ros_pkgs) which are built on top of the gazebo8 package. The steps to use them are:
Add the osrfoundation repository to your sources list.
Install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-gazebo8-ros-pkgs from the osrfoundation repository, which will install the gazebo8 package.
Use catkin workspaces to compile the rest of the software used from source.
Obviously I don't really understand what is meant here, or I probably would not be having this question.
What I tried to do was make sure I uninstalled any previous version of gazebo
sudo apt-get remove '.*gazebo.*' '.*sdformat.*' '.*ignition-math.*' '.*ignition-msgs.*' '.*ignition-transport.*'
Then I installed ROS kinetic using
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop-full
Then I installed Gazebo 8 with
curl -ssL http://get.gazebosim.org | sh
and tried installing ros-kinetic-gazebo8-ros-pkgs over the default installation with
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-gazebo8-ros-pkgs
All these installations work fine, and I can start both roscore and gazebo. However, I don't seem to have gazebo/ros integration since running rostopic list only gives me the typical /rosout and /rosout_agg topics. I presume that I may have made similar mistakes as the person asking this question, but unfortunately nobody has replied to that issue yet.
It would be wonderful if someone could explain in more detail what the correct way is of setting up Gazebo 8 with ROS integration, because the tutorial definitely is not very clear to me.
I presume I could install gazebo 7, for which the integration with ROS seems to work fine, but I am not sure if the animated model examples will work in version 7. Also, since version 8 seems to be the current default version, integration with ROS should be made easy.
