A ROS Gazebo plugin to simulate ARVA sensors

Cacace, Jonathan; Mimmo, Nicola; Marconi, Lorenzo

doi:10.1109/icra40945.2020.9196914

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

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“…For the rigid-body class, instead, the most popular and widespread open-source dynamics simulators is Gazebo, 1 according to Ivaldi et al (2014) , which offers an easy and intuitive connection with the Robotic Operation System. 2 (ROS) middleware and the possibility of expanding its functionalities through the use of custom plugins ( Cacace et al, 2020 ). Indeed, leveraging the ROS ecosystem, kinematics and dynamics libraries can be exploited to simulate real systems, as shown in Figure 1 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Open-Source ROS-Gazebo Toolbox for Simulating Robots With Compliant Actuators

et al. 2021

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To enable the design of planning and control strategies in simulated environments before their direct application to the real robot, exploiting the Sim2Real practice, powerful and realistic dynamic simulation tools have been proposed, e.g., the ROS-Gazebo framework. However, the majority of such simulators do not account for some of the properties of recently developed advanced systems, e.g., dynamic elastic behaviors shown by all those robots that purposely incorporate compliant elements into their actuators, the so-called Articulated Soft Robots ASRs. This paper presents an open-source ROS-Gazebo toolbox for simulating ASRs equipped with the aforementioned types of compliant actuators. To achieve this result, the toolbox consists of two ROS-Gazebo modules: a plugin that implements the custom compliant characteristics of a given actuator and simulates the internal motor dynamics, and a Robotic Operation System (ROS) manager node used to organize and simplify the overall toolbox usage. The toolbox can implement different compliant joint structures to perform realistic and representative simulations of ASRs, also when they interact with the environment. The simulated ASRs can be also used to retrieve information about the physical behavior of the real system from its simulation, and to develop control policies that can be transferred back to the real world, leveraging the Sim2Real practice. To assess the versatility of the proposed plugin, we report simulations of different compliant actuators. Then, to show the reliability of the simulated results, we present experiments executed on two ASRs and compare the performance of the real hardware with the simulations. Finally, to validate the toolbox effectiveness for Sim2Real control design, we learn a control policy in simulation, then feed it to the real system in feed-forward comparing the results.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Open-Source ROS-Gazebo Toolbox for Simulating Robots With Compliant Actuators

et al. 2021

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A Container-based Design Methodology for Robotic Applications on Kubernetes Edge-Cloud architectures

Lumpp

Panato

Fummi

et al. 2021

2021 Forum on Specification &Amp; Design Languages (FDL)

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A Design Flow Based on Docker and Kubernetes for ROS-based Robotic Software Applications

Lumpp

Panato

Bombieri

et al. 2024

ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst.

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Human-centered robotic applications are becoming pervasive in the context of robotics and smart manufacturing and such a pervasiveness is even more expected with the shift to Industry 5.0. The always increasing level of autonomy of modern robotic platforms requires the integration of software applications from different domains to implement artificial intelligence, cognition, and human-robot/robot-robot interaction. Developing and (re)configuring such a multi-domain software to meet functional constraints is a challenging task. Even more challenging is customizing the software to satisfy non-functional requirements such as real-time, reliability, and energy efficiency. In this context, the concept of Edge-Cloud continuum is gaining consensus as a solution to address functional and non-functional constraints in a seamless way. Containerization and orchestration are becoming a standard practice as they allow for better information flow among different network levels as well as increased modularity in the use of multi-domain software components. Nevertheless, the adoption of such a practice along the design flow, from simulation to the deployment of complex robotic applications by addressing the de-facto development standards (e.g., ROS - Robotic Operating System) is still an open problem. We present a design methodology based on Docker and Kubernetes that enables containerization and orchestration of ROS-based robotic SW applications for heterogeneous and hierarchical HW architectures. The methodology aims at (i) integrating and verifying multi-domain components since early in the design flow, (ii) mapping software tasks to containers to minimize the performance and memory footprint overhead, (iii) clustering containers to efficiently distribute load across the edge-cloud architecture by minimizing resource utilization, and (iv) enabling multi-domain verification of functional and non-functional constraints before deployment. The article presents the results obtained with a real case of study, in which the design methodology has been applied to program the mission of a Robotnik RB-Kairos mobile robot in an industrial agile production chain. We have obtained reduced load on the robot’s HW with minimal performance and network overhead thanks to the optimized distributed system.

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A ROS Gazebo plugin to simulate ARVA sensors

Cited by 3 publications

References 21 publications

An Open-Source ROS-Gazebo Toolbox for Simulating Robots With Compliant Actuators

An Open-Source ROS-Gazebo Toolbox for Simulating Robots With Compliant Actuators

A Container-based Design Methodology for Robotic Applications on Kubernetes Edge-Cloud architectures

A Design Flow Based on Docker and Kubernetes for ROS-based Robotic Software Applications

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