A Gazebo Tutorial

C. G. Prince; May 25, 2007 (chris@cprince.com)
Revised: June 1, 2007; June 5, 2007; June 13, 2007; June 15, 2007; June 20, 2007; June 21, 2007; June 27, 2007; June 29, 2007

I am teaching myself how to create world models in Gazebo and how to programmatically interface to these models, so it seems reasonable to document this learning. All files for this tutorial are contained in: Tutorial.zip. Feedback, comments, etc. on this tutorial would be greatly appreciated. Email me at the above address.

APPARENT BUG LIST

See the following parts of the tutorial:
TBD.

It seems clear to me that collision detection within Gazebo models is necessary at least in some cases. For example, consider a humanoid robot model that can touch its own body. Presumably touching one's own body should be considered a contact or collision. This could be resolved by using separate spaces for the parts that need to have collisions detected, or changing the callback for collision detection. Another reason to have within-model collision detection is to allow joints to interact more naturally with their connected parts. For example, in my mobile, the parts connected with ball joints have some unusual properties that seemingly could be resolved if within-model collision detection was provided.

REFERENCES

Smith, R. (2006). Open Dynamics Engine: v0.5 User Guide. URL: http://www.ode.org/ode-docs.html (HTML format) and http://www.ode.org/ode-latest-userguide.pdf (PDF format).

Watson, J. S. (1972). Smiling, cooing, and “The Game.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 18, 323-339.