My robot model Pionner

Overview

This repo is intended to work as a tutorial for starting to work with ros + gazebo. It has a launch file with the pionner model working with ledar in world scenario.

Requiremets

• ros & gazebo
• amr-robot models link
• baxter demos link
• May need to do:

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-ros-control ros-indigo-ros-controllers

• if you don't have the models downloaded, you can get them from here

Tutorial

Set workspace

Create catkin workspace

mkdir -p ~/pioneer_sim/src 
cd ~/pioneer_sim/src 
catkin_init_workspace 
cd ~/pioneer_sim 
catkin_make install 

Clone this repo & amr robots & gazebo ros demo:

cd ~/pioneer_sim/src/
git clone https://github.com/IgnacioCarlucho/my_robot_model_pioneer
git clone https://github.com/MobileRobots/amr-ros-config
git clone https://github.com/ros-simulation/gazebo_ros_demos

amr-robots has the pionner model, meshes, etc. while ros demo has the mesh used for lidar and the cameras.

do catkin make and source

cd ~/pioneer_sim
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash

How to run

to run we need to do:

cd src/my_robot_model_pioneer/launch
roslaunch robot.launch

This runs an empty world + the includes in the file "/world/myrobot_world". And spawns the pioneer's urdf model in this world.
Now by doing

rostopic list

we can see the rosaria topics and the sonars. If you wanna change the topics names or modify parameters of the configuration, that can be done in the urdf file.

Pionner model is a urdf file. It is automatically generated from a xacro file. If you modify the xacro then you have to generate the urdf by doing:

rosrun xacro xacro --inorder -o model.urdf model.urdf.xacro

Visualizing variables:

You can send velocity commands by doing:

rostopic pub /sim_p3at/cmd_vel geometry_msgs/Twist '[0.1, 0.0, 0.0]' '[0.0, 0.0, 0.0]'

There is also an amazing tool for real time plotting, rqt plot, to plot for instance the velocity of the robot:

rqt_plot /sim_p3at/odom/twist/twist/linear/x:y:z

while the velocity is:

rqt_plot /sim_p3at/odom/pose/pose/position/x:y:z

There is another plotting tool, Rviz, that allows you to see the laser points in real time. First you need to transform the laser reference frame:

rosrun tf static_transform_publisher 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 map laser_frame 100

run rviz:

rosrun rviz rviz