Hi all,
I’m not sure if people are aware, but if you’re looking for some good Gazebo worlds to simulate your robot in, AWS Robomaker has released a few for the community that you might want to take a look at:
Small Warehouse World - this is good for simulating your AMRs in a warehouse / logistics environment. There are also useful model assets here such as stacks of cardboard boxes, shelving and a pallet jack.
We’ve done some multi-robot simulations using this world, in particular using the Clearpath Husky and Ridgeback robots, and I think it would be really cool if someone did a Navigation2 demo of something like that in this world. Maybe someone from the Navigation2 WG wants to try that? @smac are you interested?
Also available is the Bookstore world (good for testing retail type robots):
I have a pinned post in the Navigation2 slack on #testing regarding building a more realistic production environment for CI testing (maybe a larger variant of the warehouse model). The goal is then to add a bunch of active blocking factors or edge conditions to test that things are working properly rather than generally (ex. narrow spaces, ask to drive through closed door that opens after a recovery behavior, dynamic obstacles, multiple robots driving at each other, etc) to do some generic box-moving task or something.
I pinged @Cam_Buscaron about this on Linkedin. I’d more than welcome a AWS collaboration to build some of this. I think we can make something sufficiently general that it could be useful for stress testing a large number of mobile robot systems and could be offered as an add on to the Robomaker CI testing (drop down to use this stress test world). The small warehouse world is a good starting point, but I figured we’d need something larger to set up all the robot traps and write some custom gazebo obstacle/interaction plugins. I’m not sure that this will be enough for robot-forklifts or something, but for general mobile robots, I think we could make a generic stress-test world to robustly test production navigation and autonomy systems. This would also act as a reference design for companies to exploit to build their own automated testing systems which are time consuming to construct and no good open source starting point.
Hi @smac , it’s great to see that you’ve created that project and @crystaldust is going to be working on it. I think you could use the small warehouse world and an open source AMR model like the Ridgeback (or whatever you prefer), to at least get a minimum viable product test working. For example, just having the robot move to 8 known locations within the warehouse in random order, and check that it reaches the endpoint within a reasonable amount of time. From there you can expand to other cases within that world, then expand the world itself.
I think you could do similarly with the other worlds - small house and bookstore, and with other robots. I recently got a PR2 running in the bookstore world using the pr2_2dnav_slam package (for Melodic not ROS 2), which was fun. Maybe someone wants to port PR2 to ROS 2 or use Nav2 with a ros1_bridge to the PR2. Just another idea if someone’s looking for a fun project.
I’m hoping to get some time to work on ROS 2 myself again soon, if so I might do some of this, but just wanted to throw some ideas out for now.
We don’t have immediate plans to do so, but if there’s enough demand from the community, we could definitely discuss either releasing them or uploading them to Ignition Fuel. First I wanted to make people aware of these resources and see if there’s much interest.
Hi everybody! Maybe someone can explain how to create similar projects? Maybe there is some papers about this in the web? That a pity, but I can’t find it.
It’s not a tutorial, but this post on RSE can give you pointers to start.
I’ve had good results in buying a model online, but it was a lot of work to clean up the model in Blender, apply textures and lighting, and bake textures and light maps.
Next time I’d try to find a native Blender model with textures and lighting already applied.
