Duisterhof / argos_bridge

A ROS plugin for the ARGoS robot simulator, enabling large-scale swarm robotic simulations using ROS.

Introduction

The purpose of this package is to connect ROS with the ARGoS (henceforth argos) robot simulator.

http://www.argos-sim.info

The basic concept is the use of an argos plugin (in the 'plugin' directory). When argos is executed it looks at ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH which you should have configured to find this plugin. The plugin represents a single robot which subscribes and publishes to ROS topics. If the argos world has multiple robots, they will each have a separate instance of the C++ class in the 'plugin' dir which connects to ROS.

Setup

It is assumed that argos has been installed.

The contents of this directory should be placed within your ROS catkin workspace src directory (e.g. ~/catkin_ws/src).

The directory 'ros_lib_links' has a symbolic link to libroscpp.so. This may need to be updated for your system (most likely).

The following environment variables should be set, replacing 'catkin_ws' with a suitable value if necessary:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib/argos3
export ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH=$HOME/catkin_ws/src/argos_bridge/ros_lib_links
export ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH=$ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH:$HOME/catkin_ws/devel/lib

Of course, you had better check that all of these paths make sense.

Use

Once the package has been built (with catkin_make --- see "Issues" below) do the following, or some variation:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/argos_bridge
./launch/launch_demo.sh

This executes a script which generates a launch file which is passed to roslaunch for execution. Each robot will be running a different instance of 'demo_controller.py' from the 'scripts' directory.

argos3 -c argos_worlds/construct.argos

Hit the play button on the simulator.

Issues

• There is some issue in the order of building the messages in 'msg' and the argos plugin in 'plugin'. To resolve, comment out the following line in CMakeLists.txt:

  add_subdirectory(plugin)

  Go ahead and do 'catkin_make' then uncomment the line and do another 'catkin_make'. This should only occur once.

• If there are issues related to ros::console::initialized, check your ROS version and if the ROS_DISTRO env is set.

Author

Andrew Vardy ([e-mail]) Department of Computer Science Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Memorial University St. John's, Canada