Advantech Robotic Suite/Gazebo

Introduction

Gazebo is a 3D simulator designed to accurately and efficiently simulate robots in complex indoor and outdoor environments. Unlike typical game engines, Gazebo offers high-fidelity physics simulation, a variety of sensors, and user-friendly interfaces for both users and programs. It can fully integrate with ROS (Robot Operating System) using the gazebo_ros package, allowing you to control simulated robots with ROS messages and services.

Typical uses of Gazebo include:

• Testing robotics algorithms
• Designing robots
• Performing regression testing with realistic scenarios

Key features of Gazebo:

• Multiple physics engines
• A rich library of robot models and environments
• A wide variety of sensors
• Convenient programmatic and graphical interfaces

Recommand Requirement

• Processor (CPU) — Quad core Intel i5, or equivalent
• Memory (RAM) — 4 GB or more
• [Optional] Graphics card (GPU) — Dedicated GPU with 1 GB or more graphics memory
• Disk space — At least 500 MB free disk space

Install

First install some necessary tools:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lsb-release curl gnupg

Then install Gazebo (It is recommended to install the appropriate version, please refer to gazebosim):

sudo curl https://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.gpg --output /usr/share/keyrings/pkgs-osrf-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/pkgs-osrf-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gz-garden

How to

Run gazebo

gz sim

Choose the world you want to execute.

For quick use and test, select “Tugbot In Warehouse”, and click RUN.

Connect with ros2

Install ros_gz_bridge

sudo apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-ros-gz

Create bridge from gazebo and ros2

For example: bridge lidar and camera data, then observing in Rviz2.

ros2 run ros_gz_bridge parameter_bridge /world/world_demo/model/tugbot/link/scan_omni/sensor/scan_omni/scan/points@sensor_msgs/msg/PointCloud2[gz.msgs.PointCloudPacked
ros2 run ros_gz_bridge parameter_bridge /world/world_demo/model/tugbot/link/camera_front/sensor/color/image@sensor_msgs/msg/Image[gz.msgs.Image

Download worlds and models

We can download other worlds and models in gazebosim_app.