Gazebo Planar Movement Plugin

Distro	CI Status
Humble

Motivation

Movement planning packages in ROS for differential drive or omni-directional drive mobile robots usually publish a Twist message on the topic cmd_vel. In order to simulate these robots, a Gazebo plugin is required to listen to this topic, then apply the appropriate movement to the simulated robot Model in Gazebo.

Goals

• If in position mode:
  • Listen to the /cmd_vel Twist message and update the appropriate Gazebo Model with a time interpolated position update based on the Twist linear and angular velocity.
• If in velocity mode:
  • Listen to the /cmd_vel Twist message and update the appropriate Gazebo Model velocities with the Twist linear and angular velocities.
• Odometry in the form of nav_msgs/Odometry shall be published on /odom or odometry_topic parmeter. This is usually used by external ROS localisation or navigation packages.
  • If ground_truth is False, configurable noise shall be applied to the odometry value.
• Imu tracking shall be published in the form of sensor_msgs/Imu.

Requirements

• Physics must be disabled using gazebo_no_physics_plugin if in position mode.

Definitions

Definition	Description
Model	An instanced SDF in Gazebo. Models consist of Links connected by Joints.

Design

Assumptions

Limitations

• The plugin simulates planar movements only. Any Z axis components of velocity shall be ignored.
  • The model position Z component shall always be set to 0.0.
• Position uncertainty is not reflected in the covariance components of the Odom and Imu topics published.
  • All relevant xyz rx ry rz covariance components are set to 0.0001.

License

This package is released under the Apache 2.0 License

Contributing

Any contribution that you make to this repository will be under the Apache-2.0 License, as dictated by that license

To contribute, issue a PR and @brta-jc (jason.cochrane@boeing.com)