Outdoor trailer URDF model
Hello everyone.
So I'm facing a very basic scenario I'm having trouble setting up. It consists of a powered vehicle (4 wheels, rear transmission) drawing an unpowered trailer (2 wheels, no transmission). The hitch connecting the two parts is a joint that is not fixed, so the trailer won't be aligned with the vehicle when the vehicle is turning, just like an articulated bus.
What I need from this model is the trailer's pose relative to the vehicle, because my gps antenna is located somewhere in the vehicle and my camera is located somewhere in the trailer, so in order to project what my camera is seeing I need this transform to update in real-time.
So far, I have wrote the URDF file following the tutorial and controlled the wheels in my vehicle using rqt_robot_steering. Gazebo shows how the robot moves and publishes transforms for the hitch revolute joint. So far so good.
When I try to merge this to my real project, where the vehicle's location (base_link) is set by my high-freq, high-precision gps antenna and the ros package geonav_transform
, I don't get the vehicle moving in Gazebo nor articulating in RViz. Probably because I need some sort of transmission to move the vehicle in Gazebo. The thing is, I don't even know if I actually need Gazebo for this. All I need is an approximate position for the trailer.
Any ideas on how I can deal with this?