The following consists of plugins, tools and libraries for the RoboComp framework to communicate with gazbeo. There are a total of 8 directories which contains different modules of the integration responsible for different funcitonalities.
gazebo_plugins: Contains all the gazebo plugins for each major sensor and component used in a robot.
gazebo_robocomp_models: Contains gazebo models of the robots and sensors that can be included inside a virtual world and
simulated.
gazebo_robocomp_msgs: Contains all the customized gazebo message types that are used to transfer data between gazebo
plugins and ice interfaces.
gazebo_robocomp_worlds: Contains all scenarios and situations under which a model can be tested.
ice-interface: Contains all ice interfaces that act as relays between the gazebo simulator and robocomp framework.
slice: Contains slice definiton for the interface that are present in the ice-interface dir.
slice_cpp: Contains the boiler plate code generated from the slice definitions.
src: Contains utilities to test the gazebo plugins.
Inorder to install the repo you must have some packages preinstalled on your system. Some of the dependencies of gazebo-robocomp package are:
- Gazebo-7: Installation instruction here.
- Zeroc-ICE-3.6: Installation instruction here.
- OpenCV: Installation instruction here.
Note: If you have already installed ROS after indigo, then you don't need to install gazebo because it gets installed automatically with ROS.
To install the repo from source:
cd
git clone https://github.com/ksakash/gazebo-robocomp
cd gazebo-robocomp
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. && make
This will the build all the plugins and ice-interfaces. For your system to know where are the plugins and gazebo models, you need to add the location of the built binaries to two gazebo environment variables: GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH & GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH. Add these two lines to your .bashrc or .zshrc
export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=$HOME/gazebo-robocomp/build/gazebo_plugins
export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=$HOME/gazebo-robocomp/gazebo_robocomp_models
This will complete the installation.
In order to use the integration with robocomp framework, for now, you just need to the endpoints at which the ice-interfaces, corresponding to all the sensors, are listening. So you can create a component using robocomp framework with the instructions given here. And, then change the endpoint given in etc/config file. So, you can run the gazebo world in which you want to simulate your bot and test your component accordingly.
gazebo --verbose ~/gazebo-robocomp/gazebo_robocomp_worlds/<Name-of-the-World>
And then you are ready to go!!!