DRC_Justin's profile - activity

If I were to tinker in the file reset_pose.py and add lines about resetting other states than just the positions, could I also zero out the velocities of the joint states? For example, when I move the waist joint to rotate the robot, it sways around due to the controller being underdamped. If I just hit 'reset pose', the robot might snap back to a certain position, but it won't have zero velocity at the joints. But if I published additional commands in the reset, I could take that out, right?

I just patched to DRCsim-1.3.1, but now when I load up the environment different things happen, all of them bad. When I just run atlasutils atlas.launch, the robot loads but falls down, saying lleguhz was not calibrated, and that it's missing drc vehicle and firehosemodel. When I run atlasutils atlaspositioncontrollers, I get all kinds of controller initialization errors, and again it's missing the vehicle and fire hose. Not sure what changed, the directory names sure didn't change with the update.

OSRF team,

When I try to move around in Gazebo, the way the software is set up seems to be that based on where my mouse is on the screen, this affects the zoom speed AND the location of the zoom center. This is very challenging to work with, and also makes for very inconsistent navigation through the world; for example, if I'm trying to zoom out while focusing on something on the bottom left corner of my viewable space, it often takes forever, and when I try to zoom out quickly by moving the mouse cursor higher on the screen, this moves the camera center away from where I want it. Then there's this yellow orb that does seems to reference my camera center, but it is not intuitive to change the location of this orb. This orb is often distracting, and hasn't been especially useful.

Is there a more elegant way to solve this? It would seem to me that decoupling the mouse wheel's zoom rate from the camera centering would be much more effective - I would advocate for keeping the zoom rate either constant or based on the acceleration of the scroll wheel (and by default fairly fast), but not linked to where the mouse cursor is. The feature of moving your camera placement based on cursor location is a great CAD innovation, but when you also add in zoom speed it all breaks down. The other issue, of course, is that 'up' in the z-axis and 'up' relative to the viewable window are often confounded, which tends to make things challenging. Any luck with using a 3-D mouse?

Gazebo 1.3 allows you to grab and move the 'sun' that is included in the default world, but when I move it it seems to have no effect on the lighting, including the shadows that are projected and the light that is cast. However, when I delete it the scene does go dark. This seems to be a glitch.

This is no longer valid - I can't find this tutorial after things moved around. Has this tutorial been removed? I was just watching the video on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZN07_5r568) but I am unsure how to replicate this, and it seems like at some point there were instructions I would like to leverage.

I'm sure I'm doing something stupid, but what combination of software do I need to have installed for there to be a gazeboros package, as is referenced in the Gazebo 1.9 tutorials for interfacing with ROS? I'm trying to spawn a model with an XACRO file, and I believe this boot has ROS Groovy installed as well as Gazebo 1.9, but I definitely don't have a gazeboros folder. My ROSPACKAGEPATH includes opt/ros/groovy/stacks, and hidden way down inside of it is the spawnmodel script, but I would have expected that in a folder actually called gazeboros, assuming that I understand the structure of sending ROS commands correctly.

Is there an actual folder called gazebo_ros, or is that just some kind of pointer? I can start up a roscore, but I wonder if we might not have the full ROS suite installed, and how much of that is necessary to run the tutorial.

Hey team,

I see a related question about spawning objects into the world via the command line. Is it possible to spawn them into a specific location via the command line, or is the starting position and orientation set exclusively by the SDF file? For example, if I have a moving platform and want to spawn objects on top of that, is there a good way to do that?

-Justin

How do you get out of full-screen mode?

I asked Brian this yesterday, but we couldn't figure it out by memory. What is the order of operations that Gazebo looks for files? Let's say there is a model file on my local machine and also a model file in the model database online, where does Gazebo go to look for the files? It seems like Gazebo is always trying to go online to download models, even if I have them stored locally. I'd like to know how to work around this, for times that I'm not online, and to manually enforce a particular model repository. This probably plays in with the difference between a <uri> call and a <model> call.

Interesting. I know the OSRF team typically goes through the tutorials after each new build and updates the tutorial language to support slight changes in the SDF format, or the scripts associated with the tutorials. However, given the crunch for the DARPA Robotics Challenge event coming up, this may have fallen off the table. Not sure what the scenario is here, but I will have a look and see if I can replicate your problem.

The launchfiles used to start up the DRC worlds don't allow for us to add a system plugin. How would I do this?

@gerkey: found the answer to my question on the other thread. We need to post that DRCsim now requires a 64-bit system. Advise that this be placed under a 'requirements' page for DRCsim, which I believe is currently absent.

@gerkey: We are running 32 bit. It returned i686. What should we be running?

Having exactly the same problem as this poster - I can't update from drcsim-2.1, and now I have gazebo-1.5 with it and nothing's working. We run an intel chip, that doesn't seem to be the problem. What would cause the apt-get update to not detect that 2.2 is available? My keys seem correct, nothing else has change with my installer lists.

Where can I find a list of available command line options for ROS and Gazebo? After reviewing the latest tutorial on the walking controller and seeing this command:

"roslaunch atlasutils atlas.launch gzworld:=atlasAtlasSimInterface.world"

it is apparent that I don't know all of the different ways we can send options to ROS and Gazebo when starting a ROS core and/or loading a Gazebo environment. I had no idea that we could overwrite the world specified in the launch file using the command above - what else can we do that I don't know? I know about the -u for pause, and -e for physics engine, but where can I find out what else I can do? Where does this information live?