simple_quad_gazebo

Very simple quadcopter for Gazebo using ROS2 Galactic. It's just a very cheap and dirty adaptation of a pre-existent Gazebo plugin called "hand of god", but now it looks like a quadcopter and you can send velocity commands too. In addition to that, it makes the quad look a little bit more realistic by faking the pitch and roll angles according to the acceleration. All settings are easy to understand, just check the simple_quad.urdf.
I wrote this because I wanted something faster than the quad plugins available for Gazebo, but I wrote the code without worrying about writing an optimized code and I never tested it against anything to confirm it's really faster than those plugins... LOL.

The easiest way to test it is cloning this repo and using docker with this script from the repo's root directory (the -d . will mount the current dir inside the docker container):

./launch_ros2_desktop.sh -g -d . --image ricardodeazambuja/ros2-galactic-desktop

colcon build --symlink-install

. install/setup.bash

ros2 launch simple_quad display.launch.py

ros2 launch simple_quad slam.launch.py 

ros2 launch simple_quad navigation.launch.py

Move to Z=0.5:

ros2 topic pub /cmd_pos geometry_msgs/msg/Pose "position:
  x: 0.0
  y: 0.0
  z: 0.5
orientation:
  x: 0.0
  y: 0.0
  z: 0.0
  w: 1.0" -1

Spin around Z with velocity 0.5rad/s:

ros2 topic pub /cmd_vel geometry_msgs/msg/Twist "linear:
  x: 0.0
  y: 0.0
  z: 0.0
angular:
  x: 0.0
  y: 0.0
  z: 0.5" -1

Control it using the keyboard:

ros2 run teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard --ros-args -r teleop_twist_keyboard:cmd_vel:=/cmd_vel

Updates

• ROS 1 Noetic version available here: https://github.com/willRicard/simple_quad_gazebo

Notes

• ExecuteProcess has a very useful parameter called respawn that relaunches a process that abnormally died (and you can control the delay with respawn_delay). I added that to te display.launch.py and it helped launching Gazebo more reliably.
• Next step is to use the Event Handlers