I'd like to announce some significant improvements in the integration of the
Gazebo simulator with ROS in next week's rollout of Hydro. These improvements will require a few updates to existing robot-specific ROS packages that use Gazebo, but should overall be painless. Most importantly,
we now have good documentation.
The old
simulator_gazebo has been replaced in Hydro with a new meta package named
gazebo_ros_pkgs. The most significant difference is that ROS no longer builds its own version of Gazebo (e.g. ros-groovy-gazebo). Instead,
ROS Hydro uses the default stand-alone version of Gazebo as an upstream dependency (debian)
. The removal of a ROS dependency held by Gazebo (urdfdom) has facilitated this change.
The primary changes:
- System dependency on Gazebo
- Treats URDF and SDF as equally as possible
- Adds out of the box support for controllers using ros_control and transmissions - see diagram
- Improvements from the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge
- Code cleanup and reduced code duplication with Gazebo
- Four new plugins: ros_video, ros_prosilica, ros_skid_steer_drive, ros_planar_move (thanks Piyush Khandelwal, Zdenek Materna)
- catkin-ized
I encourage anyone who has recently been disenfranchised with Gazebo-ROS integration to give it another try!