Gazebo, simulation, KnowRob, PointClouds

Hi All,

As far as I understand it, KnowRob (and CRAM) are using a Bullet world to do simulation and a visualization tool based on it.

Are people going with Gazebo now as their visualization tool now? Does that work seamlessly with all of the point clouds and KnowRob/CRAM simulations (over ROS messaging)?

What would also be nice is to have independent simulations running in the Gazebo package and have messages generated from within the software to be published. Say, a ball (or a hundred) is bouncing around inside the simulation. Can the ball trigger publishing a message when it bumps into something in the sim?

Any insights appreciated.

-Todd

Asked by toddcpierce on 2016-01-28 10:50:19 UTC

Comments

Answers

KnowRob in itself does not include any simulation. There is a visualization plugin (an old one written in Java and a more recent one using ROS visualization markers), but that does not include any physics. There are projects that use a physical simulator (i.e. Gazebo) for simulating the effects of e.g. egg cracking or liquid pouring actions, though I'm not sure how much of them are open source.

CRAM makes use of a Bullet world for representing the environment and for projecting the shorter-term effects of actions.

Output of a real robot or a simulated robot in any ROS-enabled simulator can be recorded and reasoned upon within KnowRob using the tools developed in the context of the openEASE project (open-ease.org).

Asked by moritz on 2016-02-03 02:15:22 UTC