Hi,
Just wanted to throw out there I just put up a section of a larger project that I think might have reuse.
The Gazebo model collision plugin is a gazebo plugin you place in your URDF that will advertise a topic giving you information if your robot is in collision with an obstacle in gazebo. You can do this with a collision object to estimate the robot footprint, or with the mesh of the link itself which is more useful for finer control. You can load this plugin into any/all links and receive really fine understanding of what exactly was in collision and in collision with what named object in the environment for analysis.
This was motivated by some research I’ve been conducting on deep reinforcement learning but I’m sure there’s better uses for it. It’s a pretty quick plugin that just exposes the collision information to ROS for an external program to utilize.
