gazebo-yarp-plugins

Plugins for exposing Yarp interfaces on Gazebo simulator models.

Installation

Dependencies

For using Yarp with Gazebo, you shall install:

• Gazebo simulator and its header files (at least version 1.9), following the instructions on the official Gazebo website. If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, remember to install the header files for Gazebo, that are contained in the libgazebo*-dev package.
• Yarp (at least version 2.3.63.2, i.e. the version available in the master branch of the yarp repository) following the instructions on the official Yarp wiki.

Gazebo is under active development, so it is recommended to use the latest released version of Gazebo.

You could prefer to run an older version of Gazebo if you want to use it with ROS integration. Depending on your ROS version you have to stick to a given Gazebo version. Yarp integration provided by gazebo-yarp-plugins is not affected by this kind of limitations.

Operating systems support

Linux and OS X are currently supported by Gazebo. OS X support in Gazebo is still experimental, and there could be problems.

Compilation

You get the gazebo-yarp-plugins source code from this git repository repository (if you do not have git on your computer, follow this guide to install it)

git clone https://github.com/robotology/gazebo-yarp-plugins.git

This will create a gazebo-yarp-plugins directory with all the source code. You can enter this directory:

cd gazebo-yarp-plugins

You can then create a build directory inside it to hold all the compiled files:

mkdir build

You can use CMake to generate the necessary file for the compilation, and compile gazebo-yarp-plugins using make. The plugins should be install in the directory specified by CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX (by default /usr/local):

cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/the/install/folder
make install

To notify Gazebo of the new plugins compiled, it is necessary to modify the GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable:

export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=${GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH}:/path/to/the/install/folder/lib

where /path/to/the/install/folder/lib is the directory containing the libgazebo_yarp_controlboard.so, libgazebo_yarp_forcetorque.so... files.

To avoid having to modify this environment variable each time, you can place this command in the .bashrc file in your home directory.

Usage

To use the gazebo-yarp-plugins you can try to use a Yarp-enabled Gazebo model of a robot. Currently three humanoids robots support gazebo-yarp-plugins: Coman, iCub and Vizzy.

Coman

To use Coman in Gazebo, please follow the instructions on gazebo-yarp-plugins wiki

iCub

To use iCub in Gazebo, please follow the instruction in the icub_gazebo repository

Vizzy

To simulate Vizzy in Gazebo please follow [the instructions on vizzy repository https://github.com/vislab-tecnico-lisboa/vizzy].

Arbitrary robot

To add gazebo-yarp-plugins to another robot, please follow the instructions on gazebo-yarp-plugins wiki

Troubleshooting

General

• If gazebo-yarp-plugins does not compile complaning about an -fPIC option missing, check that you compiled yarp with shared library option enabled.

• If Gazebo complains about not finding the libgazebo_yarp_*.so files, check if you properly defined the GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH enviroment variable.

• If Gazebo complains that a yarp server is not available, remember to launch a yarp server on your machine (i.e. open a new terminal a launch the yarpserver command).

• If the simulation run slowly, check that you are using the latest graphics driver available for your platform. If you a running a recent Ubuntu version (13.10 or 14.04) you can try (at your own risk) to use the drivers provided by the oibaf PPA.

• If Gazebo crashes without any error message while loading a model using gazebo-yarp-plugins, you have issue with shared library linking. Probably gazebo-yarp-plugins is linked against a manually installed library (for example boost), while the gazebo binary is linking against the system version of the same library. For more information read issue 71 discussion or file a new issue to get help from the developers.

Old Gazebo Versions

• In versions of Gazebo prior to 3.0 there is a bug related to the integral part of the low-level position controller. If you are using Gazebo 1.9 or 2.2 then the low level position control will excert no integral action on the model. If you want to get more informations on this bug, please check issue 119 and [Gazebo issue 1082] (https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issue/1082/jointcontroller-does-not-handle-correctly).

• In versions of Gazebo prior to 3.1 there is a bug related to the coordinates frame of the six axis force torque sensor measure, so you have to handle with care the force torque measurement returned by the gazebo_yarp_forcetorque plugin. For more informations check issue 73.

• In versions of Gazebo prior to 4.1 there is a bug affecting the use of gazebo-yarp-plugins powered model with roslaunch . For more informations check issue 123 .

Design

More information on the internal structure of gazebo-yarp-plugins is available in this wiki page.

Contributing

See Contributing File