ContactSensor in Gazebo/Fuerte

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Hi guys,

I am trying to get the Shadow-hand running in Fuerte, both the real one (EtherCAT) and the simulated one. For grasp planning, information about contacts/collision is obviously kind of important, and the Shadow hand simulation URDF model includes Gazebo bumpers (contact sensors) on all fingers. The sensors were working fine in Electric, and we got nice approximated wrenches from Gazebo.

In Fuerte, everything compiles, and the "deprecated" parser looks like it is doing the right thing of mapping the urdf <sensor:contact><geom> tag to the <contact><collision> conversions as required by newest SDF.

Problem is, the first subscriber to one of the bumper topics triggers a ContactSensor.GetContacts() call, which in turn detects that the "contacts" data-structure is read but was NEVER initialized...

Please don't blaim this on the Shadow-Hand stack. We also tried using the Gazebo contact-sensors on the PR2 gripper (vanilla Fuerte install on Ubuntu 12.04), and the same error message from "ContactSensor.cc:237" results. Simply broken in Fuerte, and possibly never tested before?

Cheers, Norman