gazebo_logical_camera_plugin_ros

This gazebo plugin can be used to simulate object detection in simulation. When the plugin is attached to a logical camera sensor, objects that appear within the camera's frustum will have their pose and bounding box information published as ObjectList ROS messages. This plugin is based on previous work available here.

Installation

These installation instructions assume that Gazebo and ROS have already been installed. In addition, you should already have a catkin workspace (YOUR_CATKIN_WS) built and containing a gazebo simulation package (world, urdfs, launch files, etc).

1. Clone this repo

    cd YOUR_CATKIN_WS/src
    git clone https://github.com/DFKI-NI/gazebo_logical_camera_plugin_ros.git
   

2. Import dependency repos

    vcs import < gazebo_logical_camera_plugin_ros/my.repos
   

3. Build workspace

    cd YOUR_CATKIN_WS
    source YOUR_CATKIN_WS/devel/setup.bash
    catkin build
   

Messages

The pose_selector uses the ObjectPose and ObjectList messages from object_pose_msgs package.

Example Usage

The following snippet can be used as an usage example:

<joint name="test_rgb_logical_joint" type="fixed">
  <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
  <parent link="camera_rgb_frame" />
  <child link="test_logical_camera_frame" />
</joint>
<link name="test_logical_camera_frame"/>

<gazebo reference="test_logical_camera_frame">
  <sensor name="logical_camera" type="logical_camera">
    <logical_camera>
      <near>0.05</near>  <!-- near clippling plane, in meters -->
      <far>3.50</far>    <!-- far clipping plane, in meters -->
      <horizontal_fov>${60.0 * pi/180.0}</horizontal_fov> <!-- horizontal FOV, in radians -->
      <aspect_ratio>${640.0/480.0}</aspect_ratio> <!-- camera aspect ratio -->
    </logical_camera>
    <visualize>false</visualize> <!-- visualize camera frustum in Gazebo (can cause issues) -->
    <always_on>true</always_on>
    <update_rate>10</update_rate> <!-- update rate of logical camera -->
    <plugin name="logical_camera_plugin" filename="liblogical_camera_plugin.so">
      <cameraName>test_logical_camera</cameraName>
      <imageTopicName>test_logical_image</imageTopicName>
      <frameName>test_logical_camera_frame</frameName>
    </plugin>
  </sensor>
</gazebo>

In general, the plugin should be attached to a similar link as the actual camera (camera_rgb_frame in above example, where the test_logical_camera_frame is attached at the same lcoation as camera_rgb_frame). The FOV, clipping planes, aspect ratio, and ROS publishing parameters can be configured in the urdf.xacro.