Greetings,
I'd like to announce some significant improvements in the integration of
the Gazebo simulator <
http://gazebosim.org/> 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<
http://gazebosim.org/wiki/Tutorials#ROS_Integration>
.*
The old simulator_gazebo <
http://www.ros.org/wiki/simulator_gazebo> has
been replaced in Hydro with a new meta package named
gazebo_ros_pkgs<
http://www.ros.org/wiki/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<
http://gazebosim.org/wiki/Tutorials/1.9/ROS_Control_with_Gazebo>
- Improvements from the DARPA Virtual Robotics
Challenge<
http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge.aspx>
- 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've created a nice *diagram*
<
http://gazebosim.org/wiki/Tutorials/1.9/Overview_of_new_ROS_integration>and
migration guide<
http://gazebosim.org/wiki/Tutorials/1.9/Overview_of_new_ROS_integration>
for
the changes involved.
I encourage anyone who has recently been disenfranchised with Gazebo-ROS
integration to give it another try!
Thanks,
Dave Coleman
Open Source Robotics Foundation | 251.463.2345 | davetcoleman.com
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