SnakeSim

SnakeSim provides a ROS2 and Webots simulation environment of a simple redundant robotic arm performing cartesian motion in a 3D workspace.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed on your system (Ubuntu 22.04):

• ROS2 Humble Hawksbill
• Webots

Installation Steps

1. Install ROS2 on Ubuntu 22.04

Follow the official ROS2 installation guide for Debian packages here.

2. Create a ROS2 Workspace and clone the package

mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src
cd ~/ros2_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/hugotallys/snakesim.git

3. Build the Workspace and source the setup file

cd ~/ros2_ws
colcon build --symlink-install
source install/local_setup.sh

4. Install Webots

Download and install Webots from the official Webots website. You should also install the webots_ros2_driver:

sudo apt-get install ros-humble-webots-ros2

More information on how to setup a Webots simulation with ROS can be found in the official ROS2 documenation

5. Setup Python Environment

Create a virtual environment and install the necessary Python packages:

python3 -m venv ~/ros2_ws/venv
source ~/ros2_ws/venv/bin/activate

You must ensure Colcon ignores the python venv

touch ~/ros2_ws/venv/COLCON_IGNORE

Install the python packages with pip:

pip install -r ~/ros2_ws/src/snakesim/requirements.txt

Running the Simulation

Open a terminal source the workspace. We first instatiate the simulator with the action server node:

cd ~/ros2_ws
source install/local_setup.zsh
ros2 launch snakesim snake_launch.py

To start the trajectory execution start the action client in another tab:

cd ~/ros2_ws
source install/local_setup.zsh
ros2 run snakesim snake_trajectory_client --ros-args -p metric_name:=<metric_name> -p experiment_type:=<experiment_type>

Where <metric_name> is the name of the metric to be optimized and <experiment_type> is the type of experiment to be executed. The values that can be chosen are:

• metric_name: joint_distance, manipulability.
• experiment_type: null_space, trajectory.