ROSCon 2018 Informal Meetings of Special Interest Groups

General
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Notes from the Gazebo Interest Group, my apologies for any errors:

Attendees:

Andrew Symington @Andrew_Symington

Carlos Rosales Gallegos @carlosjoserg

Musa Morena Marcusso @musamarcusso

Ray Cole @raycoleiii

Robert Lösch

Marcus

Ruffin @ruffsl

Plus many Open Robotics people

Gazebo not shutting down properly

Sim of wheeled robots driving in mining tunnels, but the simulation is slow and he doesn’t know why

Had a problem with robot not falling after attaching robot arm with position controller

How to learn more about gazebo_ros

How to unthrottle simulation that could go faster than real-time

Is the CreateLink function working? (written by @jrivero, not sure who asked this)

Spawning models:

  • Race conditions if one needs to be spawned before the other (such as a free-floating robot on a granite table, want them to be spawned dynamically so they can be written in urdf)
    • There is a spawn_model service in gazebo_ros, but it returns too fast
    • Shane discussed a special xml tag to insert an SDF
  • The spawn_model service should use quaternions instead of roll-pitch-yaw

While running lots of simulations, sometimes the simulation fails with a GLX-related error

  • If it’s just gzserver and it doesn’t use rendering, these errors can be avoided by disabling rendering in gzserver (it will also speed it up slightly) by using a bad DISPLAY variable or running inside a docker container that doesn’t have nvidia-docker enabled

FBX support

  • There are lots of existing models on sketchfab, often in FBX format. Bosch is interested in being able to parse FBX models.
    • Ian has worked on this, but it’s proprietary and complicated. We may come back to it if there is sufficient interest and support.

Modeling sea-floor

  • Current workflow is to bake lots of textures into a single mesh, but it’s hard to export from blender.
    • Is the sea-floor like a DEM? There are some performance advantages to using DEM’s.

VisualPlugins

  • Underwater plumes are visualized in RVIZ with markers, but want to visualize in gzclient too. Is it possible?
    • It’s easier with markers. (I didn’t get all of Louise’s answer here)

Camera following

  • Some sequence of moving camera and then follow an object caused camera to go a bit crazy

Camera Z-up

  • Some people need to use Z-down, so it’s hard to make the camera point upside down. Andrew Symington would like to turn off the camera auto-flip

Domain randomization

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