Unmanned Ground Vehicle Modelling in Gazebo/ROS-Based Environments

Abstract

The fusion of different technologies is the base of the fourth industrial revolution. Companies are encouraged to integrate new tools in their production processes in order to improve working conditions and increase productivity and production quality. The integration between information, communication technologies and industrial automation can create highly flexible production models for products and services that can be customized through real-time interactions between consumer, production and machinery throughout the production process. The future of production, therefore, depends on increasingly intelligent machinery through the use of digital systems. The key elements for future integrated devices are intelligent systems and machines, based on human–machine interaction and information sharing. To do so, the implementation of shared languages that allow different systems to dialogue in a simple way is necessary. In this perspective, the use of advanced prototyping tools like Open-Source programming systems, the development of more detailed multibody models through the use of CAD software and the use of self-learning techniques will allow for developing a new class of machines capable of revolutionizing our companies. The purpose of this paper is to present a waypoint navigation activity of a custom Wheeled Mobile Robot (WMR) in an available simulated 3D indoor environment by using the Gazebo simulator. Gazebo was developed in 2002 at the University of Southern California. The idea was to create a high-fidelity simulator that gave the possibility to simulate robots in outdoor environments under various conditions. In particular, we wanted to test the high-performance physics Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) and the sensors feature present in Gazebo for prototype development activities. This choice was made for the possibility of emulating not only the system under analysis, but also the world in which the robot will operate. Furthermore, the integration tools available with Solidworks and Matlab-Simulink, well known commercial platforms of modelling and robotics control respectively, are also explored.

Design and Control System Setup of an E-Pattern Omniwheeled Cellular Conveyor

“…Gazebo is said to be capable of simulating a larger environment and larger number of robots than V-REP [27]. Gazebo is also validated in terms of performance and modelling by using a simple differential robot, and the outcome is promising [28]. Gazebo has limitations in restructuring the meshes of the imported object, and has no interface with Python programming language, whereas V-REP is more flexible in meshing and has built-in Application Programming Interface (API) for Python programming language.…”

Haptic Devices Based on Real-Time Dynamic Models of Multibody Systems

“…where Ω 23 represents the relative angular velocity vector of body 2 with respect to body 3. Among the three components of this vector (and of all vectors recursively computed in the same manner as vector ω 3 in (15)), one surprisingly notices that some of them are squarely useless for the final form of the equations of motion (3) or (4).…”

“…The so-called middleware platforms are able to manage the communications between the different interfaces and facilitate the code modularity and reuse. Rivera presented a recent summary of the middleware platforms in [ 23 ], while using a Gazebo/ROS-based environments for his application. The ROS environment is now widely used for real-time robotics, for example, in [ 24 ] to represent a complex robot real-time dynamic simulator.…”

Digital Twin‐Enabled Online Battlefield Learning with Random Finite Sets

“…UGVs are the vehicles that operate while in contact with the ground and without a human presence on board. How to feed back the effective information collected from the real battlefield to the simulation space and how to enable the benefits of future paradigms, such as the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and digital twin, are big challenges for unmanned combat [4][5][6][7]. In this paper, we employ the UGV as the experimental subject to specify our contributions in implementing digital twins in unmanned combat.…”