Resources to learn gazebo physics?

Hi everyone,

I'm a robot hobbyist and a software developer by trade. I'm trying to learn building simulations in Ros with Gazebo, however I have a basic knowledge of physics concepts such as inertia matrix, spring stiffness, damping etc. The SDF docs are no help given they don't provide the intuition for those parameters.

Can you provide any resources or a starting point for a beginner to learn physics for Gazebo?

Thanks,

Asked by antonm on 2018-11-15 11:46:07 UTC

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Answers

Although you can learn how to calculate the moments of inertia by hand, I've never done it for an actual project. It gets very complicated very quickly.

There are programs that can calculate these physical properties for you from any water-tight mesh or any solid CAD program can also generate them automatically. For example if you have a mesh of a link part in STL format you can use the free MeshLab program to calculate the inertial properties, (mass, principal axes & tensor). This tool assumes unit scale and unit density, so you may have the scale results if your model is not in meters.

Hope this helps.

Asked by PeteBlackerThe3rd on 2018-11-16 07:13:31 UTC

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There are a set of physics tutorials that you might find helpful.

ODE is Gazebo's default physics engine, and you might find their documentation insightful.

Asked by nkoenig on 2018-11-16 10:20:07 UTC