gazebo_sfm_plugin

A plugin for simulation of human pedestrians in ROS2 and Gazebo.

Tested in ROS2 Galactic and Gazebo 11

The persons are affected by the obstacles and other persons using the Social Force Model

Plugin configuration

The plugin can be applied to each Gazebo Actor indicated in the Gazebo world file.

An example snippet is shown next:

<actor name="actor1">
	<pose>-1 2 1.25 0 0 0</pose>
	<skin>
		<filename>walk.dae</filename>
		<scale>1.0</scale>
	</skin>
	<animation name="walking">
		<filename>walk.dae</filename>
		<scale>1.000000</scale>
		<interpolate_x>true</interpolate_x>
	</animation>
	<!-- plugin definition -->
	<plugin name="actor1_plugin" filename="libPedestrianSFMPlugin.so">
		<velocity>0.9</velocity>
		<radius>0.4</radius>
		<animation_factor>5.1</animation_factor>
		<people_distance>6.0</people_distance>
		<!-- weights -->
		<goal_weight>2.0</goal_weight>
		<obstacle_weight>80.0</obstacle_weight>
		<social_weight>15</social_weight>
		<group_gaze_weight>3.0</group_gaze_weight>
		<group_coh_weight>2.0</group_coh_weight>
		<group_rep_weight>1.0</group_rep_weight>
		<ignore_obstacles>
			<model>cafe</model>
			<model>ground_plane</model>
		</ignore_obstacles>
		<trajectory>
			<cyclic>true</cyclic>
			<waypoint>-1 2 1.25</waypoint>
			<waypoint>-1 -8 1.25</waypoint>
		</trajectory>
	</plugin>
</actor>

The parameters that can be configured for each pedestrian are:

General params

<velocity>. Maximum velocity (m/s) of the pedestrian.
<radius>. Approximate radius of the pedestrian's body (m).
<animation_factor>. Factor employed to coordinate the animation with the walking velocity.
<people_distance>. Maximum detection distance of the surrounding pedestrians.

SFM Weights

The weight factors that modify the navigation behavior. See the Social Force Model for further information.

Obstacle params

<ignore_obstacles>. All the models that must be ignored as obstacles, must be indicated here. The other actors in the world are included automatically.

Trajectory params

<trajectory>. The list of waypoints that the actor must reach must be indicated here.
- <waypoint>. Each waypoint must be indicated by its coordinates X, Y, Z in the world frame.
- <cyclic>. If true, the actor will start the waypoint sequence when the last waypoint is reached.

Dependencies

Yo must download and install the Social Force Model library, lightsfm https://github.com/robotics-upo/lightsfm

Compilation

This is a ROS2 package so it must be placed inside a ROS2 workspace and compiled through the regular colcon compiler.

colcon build --packages-select gazebo_sfm_plugin

Example

An example Gazebo world can be launched through:

ros2 launch gazebo_sfm_plugin cafe_ros2.launch.py

TommasoVandermeer / gazebo_sfm_plugin