Elizabeth C's profile - activity

That would have been a very nice thing to document somewhere other than the answers site.

URDF. But after I asked the question, I got models to show up the right size in both programs by changing the unit tag to <`unit name="meter" meter="1.00"/`> in all the mesh files (and manually multiplying all dimensions in the table mesh file by .0254...), so I guess the original question isn't quite relevant now. However, I'd still like to know **why** the programs interpret things differently and which way is correct.

I'm using a slightly modified version of the Robonaut with Gazebo 1.7.1 (and ROS Fuerte). Obviously the Robonaut works fine in previous versions of Gazebo, but in this version, the parts (which use collada .dae meshes) spawn 100x too small. (It took me forever to notice the tiny robot parts floating in midair and realize that was the problem...) However, it shows up at the proper scale in rviz. The meshes have the following unit tag: <unit name="centimeter" meter="0.01"/>.

I also have a URDF model of a table that uses a collada .dae mesh I made with SketchUp. This appears at the correct size in Gazebo 1.7.1, but it's huge in rviz. It's also huge in the Fuerte version of Gazebo. The unit tag is <unit meter="0.0254000" name="inch" />.

This question is related, but I still don't understand why the Robonaut spawned at the correct scale in previous Gazebo versions, and why it still appears at the correct scale in rviz. Is the change due to an update in how Gazebo handles mesh parsing? Which program is in error? Do I have to update the units in all the Robonaut mesh files and in my table mesh file?

I went ahead and marked @scpeters' answer as correct, because it does answer my original question. The thing I left out of the original question was that I need to spawn URDF models (and would prefer not to convert them to SDF). @AndreiHaidu's answer inspired the solution I actually used, which was to modify drcsim's gazebo_ros_api_plugin to provide the spawning services. It turns out that the lines to provide the services were present, but not being compiled due to dependency issues that would arise when compiling drcsim. (I discovered later that I should have used the simulator_gazebo version of gazebo_ros_api_plugin, because it has some bug fixes that the drcsim version doesn't.) Then I was able to use the modified version of the plugin with the system version of Gazebo to spawn URDF models via ROS, though Gazebo is displaying one of the models 100 times smaller than it should be... (But that's another issue.)

If anyone wants details on what I did, leave a comment and I'll expand the answer.

Thank you! Problem is, this doesn't work for URDF files, which is what all the models I'm using are. I guess I didn't specify that in my original question, though, so I'll go ahead and accept this answer (because it is correct that gzfactory does what I asked for).

The versions of Gazebo that ship with the simulator_gazebo stack include a spawn_model script that calls the service /gazebo/spawn_gazebo_model or /gazebo/spawn_urdf_model to spawn a new model into an already-running world. However, drcsim doesn't provide either of these services. Is there some other way to programmatically spawn a model into an already running instance of the drcsim version of Gazebo? (I found some tutorials on modifying world contents, but they involve creating a new .world file, which is not what I want to do.) Or could I change something somewhere to make drcsim advertise the /gazebo/spawn_*_model topics?

(The reason I'm asking is because I'd like to use the drcsim version of Gazebo for something non-DRC-related that I'm doing, because it's newest and (presumably) most stable version of Gazebo that's integrated with ROS.)