radarays_gazebo_plugins

Dependencies

rmagine (embree / optix backend)
rmagine_gazebo_plugins
radarays_ros

Raytracing acceleration structure - World file

For constructing and continuously updating the acceleration structure for ray tracing, add the following lines to your world files:

<sdf version="1.4">
<world name="default">

...

<!-- CPU: Embree Map Plugin -->
<plugin name='rmagine_embree_map' filename='librmagine_embree_map_gzplugin.so'>
  <update>
    <delta_trans>0.001</delta_trans>
    <delta_rot>0.001</delta_rot>
    <delta_scale>0.001</delta_scale>
    <rate_limit>200</rate_limit>
  </update>
</plugin>

<!-- Optix Map Plugin -->
<plugin name='rmagine_optix_map' filename='librmagine_optix_map_gzplugin.so'>
  <update>
    <delta_trans>0.001</delta_trans>
    <delta_rot>0.001</delta_rot>
    <delta_scale>0.001</delta_scale>
    <rate_limit>500</rate_limit>
  </update>
</plugin>

...

</world>
</sdf>

See rmagine_gazebo_plugins for further explanations on that.

Materials

You can assign so called radarays_materials to visuals of a model. An example is in worlds/avz_collada.world:

...
<model name="avz_map">
  <static>true</static>
  <link name="avz_map_link">
    <pose>0 0 0 0 0 0</pose>
    <visual name="avz_map_visual">
      <cast_shadows>false</cast_shadows>
      <geometry>
        <mesh>
            <uri>./avz_no_roof.stl</uri>
            <scale>1.0 1.0 1.0</scale>
        </mesh>
      </geometry>
      <radarays_material>
        <velocity>0.0</velocity>
        <ambient>1.0</ambient>
        <diffuse>0.0</diffuse>
        <specular>3000.0</specular>
      </radarays_material>
    </visual>
...

Examples

Important files are:

urdf/robot_radar_cpu.urdf -> URDF for a robot with a radar sensor simulated on CPU
urdf/robot_radar_gpu.urdf -> URDF for a robot with a radar sensor simulated on GPU
worlds/avz_collada.world -> Gazebo world-file that contains a mesh of an office with radarays_materials attached to it.

example_robot.launch

Example for a robot that is spawned in a office-like environment, with radarays_materials attached to it.

Run CPU version of radarays with Gazebo by calling

roslaunch radarays_gazebo_plugins example_robot.launch rmagine:=embree

Run GPU version of radarays with Gazebo by calling

roslaunch radarays_gazebo_plugins example_robot.launch rmagine:=optix

Radar Parameters

You can change the radar parameters of the Gazebo simulation using dynamic reconfigure:

rosrun rqt_reconfigure rqt_reconfigure

Note: We are using the same set of parameters (configuration file) we used for the experiments in radarays_ros:

Some parameters are only used in the experiments but not in the Gazebo simulation
For the sake of performance, the Gazebo plugin does not consider the robot's motion while simulating a polar image. (we will add this in the future)

Known Issues

At some point I got a segmentation fault when using rmagine's CPU simulators inside of the Gazebo threads. Unfortunately, I couldn't reproduce those errors.

uos / radarays_gazebo_plugins