Simulating a thermal camera in gazebo
How can thermal cams be simulated in gazebo? It looks like in principle, gazebo has (or had) support for a fiducial interface that would allow to write out information about objects regardless of their visuals. This could in theory be used if only certain objects are of interest.
As my scenario also involves finding only objects of interest of a certain temperature my quick fix solution will be to model them as COLLADA models and set their emissive and ambient colors to max red [255,0,0]. Then, using a modified camera sensor, only the max red pixels of the acquired image will be set to white (for white hot) in the simulated MONO8 thermal image. Of course, one has to take care that the "thermal marker color" (in my example max red) does not appear elsewhere in the world, but using normal lighting this should be pretty easy. This approach of course only works well if we're looking for sparsely scattered, small objects of interest, as otherwise the whole world will look bright red in visualization.
Now, another story is actually simulating thermal signatures of objects, but I guess this is currently not supported (short of actually modeling the visuals of all objects as they would appear in thermals). Any ideas and suggestions concerning this topic are welcome.
