Simulating a Freight robot in Gazebo

Installation

Before installing the simulation environment, make sure your desktop is setup with a standard installation of ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04. Once your APT repositories are configured, you can install the simulator:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-fetch-gazebo-demo

Warning

Never run the simulator on the robot. Simulation requires that the ROS parameter use_sim_time be set to true, which will cause the robot drivers to stop working correctly. In addition, be sure to never start the simulator in a terminal that has the ROS_MASTER_URI set to your robot for the same reasons.

Starting the Simulator

The fetch_gazebo and fetch_gazebo_demo packages provide the Gazebo environment for Fetch. fetch_gazebo includes several launch files:

• simulation.launch spawns a robot in an empty world.
• playground.launch spawns a robot inside a lab-like test environment. This environment has some tables with items that may be picked up and manipulated. It also has a pre-made map which can be used to test out robot navigation and some simple demonstrations of object grasping.

To start the simplest environment with Freight

$ roslaunch fetch_gazebo simulation.launch robot:=freight

Adding a Brick wall to see how lidar scan works:

Visualizing with RVIZ

Even though Gazebo has a graphical visualization, RVIZ is still the preferred tool for interacting with your robot.

$ rosrun rviz rviz