Kurt Leucht's profile - activity

simple one liner tutorial gazebo plugin is not working I feel really stupid. I'm just trying to go through some simple

Yeah, that link is broken. Not my fault. It worked in August of 2014.

simple one liner tutorial gazebo plugin is not working I feel really stupid. I'm just trying to go through some simple

The Gazebo plugins are there to simulate sensors or to simulate the motors or actuators of your simulated robot. For example, there's an ultrasonic sensor plugin that looks at what's in front of the sensor and publishes a sensormsgs/Range message. There is also a differential drive plugin that looks at input from a geometrymsgs/Twist message and turns the simulated robot's wheels appropriately. The code that looks at the Range data and publishes Twist commands is your custom robot code.

Usually there is a software module in the middle that is considered your robot controller. It reads from sensors and it sends commands to actuators. Often, how your robot reacts to sensor inputs depends on your application and your situation, so this middle layer is usually your custom code. I'm not sure if this answers your question or not.

Thanks for testing it and posting the results!

Thanks! Will it go even faster if the gazebo GUI isn't launched?

I found some questions on this site where people are trying to get Gazebo to run faster, but in most cases they just want it to run at real time speed. What if I want to simulate a robot at 10 times or 100 times real-time speed? Is that even possible with Gazebo?

Per this question: http://answers.gazebosim.org/question/6584/my-mobile-robot-slowly-rolls-with-no-forces/

... I had some instability problems with my robot model definition which caused it to slowly roll on the ground plane with no forces applied. Since I got that issue solved, I have had no more instances of my robot flying up into the air. So the two problems were probably due to the same model definition issue. Buggy model, in other words. Thanks.

This sounds like a nice feature that I might be wanting to use if ever implemented.

Is there a way to suggest this as a future feature? I'm thinking that once follow mode is activated and the camera zooms out to 8 meters, I'm thinking the mouse's zoom function ought to be active and the zoom should hold to the new value.

Done. Thanks. Is there a way today in Gazebo 1.9 to change the sky color without clouds? Just wondering due to the wording in your comment above.

Cool! Thanks for this answer! Is there a way to make the sky red instead of blue? I played with the color values inside the scene tag and I could get the ground to turn red, but the sky remained blue. Changing the ambient values inside the cloud tag didn't seem to have any effect. I'm using Gazebo 1.9.

It works! Thanks!

I'm pretty new to Gazebo, so I apologize. I'm confused about Gazebo plugins. I have used the skid steer plugin and the differential drive plugins that were in a Gazebo tutorial and they both worked fine in my robot models. So I know how to use plugins, at least a little.

Now I'm starting to add sensors to my robot models and I can't figure out how to use the hectorgazeboplugins GazeboRosSonar plugin. http://wiki.ros.org/hectorgazeboplugins

Is this something that is already built into Gazebo or ROS or is this something that I need to download and build on my machine? If the latter, then where are the download and install instructions? The above URL appears to just be API documentation.

I'm using ROS Hydro and Gazebo 1.9.

Thanks. I'm new enough that I sometimes forget to try the ros-[version]-[package name] naming convention.

Wow! That's going to be awesome! Thanks!

There are a number of commonly used CAD and game design tools out there that are fully capable of creating 3D objects and linking them together and applying textures and colors and such. So I don't think anyone should reinvent that wheel. But is there a plugin or feature of any of those existing tools that can export the data into a form that I can directly use in Gazebo, like SDF?

I've built a number of small robot models and sensor models and used them successfully within Gazebo, but it was a lot of work and the work is quite error prone. It seems to me that there ought to be a better way than manually editing an XML file. It would be quicker, I think, and less error prone if a GUI existed that allowed you to create 3D objects and attach them to each other and apply colors and textures and so on and then just export the final product as an SDF file.

Does one exist, and if not why hasn't anyone created an SDF export plugin for some of the most widely used free CAD or game design applications that are out there? Is the customer base too small?

I'm using ROS Hydro with Gazebo 1.9.