Simulation

3D simulation with Gazebo

Introduction to Gazebo world environments

PAL’s robots can be simulated with the Gazebo simulator, that offers a realistic 3D environment for simulating and testing our robots. It is integrated with ROS 2 providing features like accurate physics simulation, sensors emulation and customizable environments.

Several different world environments are provided with PAL’s robots:

• Empty world is loaded as default when the simulation is launched. The robot spawns in an empty world with no objects, as shown in Figure: Empty world simulated in Gazebo. In order to launch the simulation, the following instruction needs to be executed in a terminal:

  source /opt/pal/${PAL_DISTRO}/setup.bash
  ros2 launch robot_name_gazebo robot_name_gazebo.launch.py
  

  

  Figure: Empty world simulated in Gazebo

• Office world is a simple office world as shown in Figure: Small office world simulated in Gazebo can be launched with the following instruction:

  source /opt/pal/${PAL_DISTRO}/setup.bash
  ros2 launch robot_name_gazebo robot_name_gazebo.launch.py world:=small_office
  

  

  Figure: Small office world simulated in Gazebo

• PAL Gazebo worlds custom worlds are created by PAL Robotics and are also available in the humble distro or can be found at the following link: https://github.com/pal-robotics/pal_gazebo_worlds

PAL robots simulation

TIAGo ProKangarooTIAGoTIAGo++ARITALOS

To start TIAGo Pro using the Gazebo simulation run the following command:

source /opt/pal/${PAL_DISTRO}/setup.bash
ros2 launch tiago_pro_gazebo tiago_pro_gazebo.launch.py

Figure: TIAGo Pro robot simulated in Gazebo

Interaction simulation with PAL’s Interaction Simulator

See PAL Interaction simulator for more information.