Porting the demo to Fortress

The main objective this week was to port the simulation to Gazebo Fortress and to not use the kobuki package.

Porting to Fortress

After two weeks being unsucsesful with this, I finally got it to work. The only issue is that the kobuki robot didn’t work properly, so in the end I was forced to uses the turtlebot3 that can be find in this link from a tutorial from gazebo.

All the things done this week can be found in this repo, that was created in order to replace the kobuki package in the demo.

Fortress_sim package

The purpose of this package is to serve as a gazebo fortress launcher for “any” robot, right now it only works with the turtlebot3, and to launch the navigation stack for the simulation.

Aws world fork

This is a fork of the aws-robomaker-small-house-world that works for the new gazebo.

What I needed to change in this package was mainly the plugin used in the world file, the gazebo packages used in the Cmake and in the package.xml, and remove the inertia of one model because this was crashing the simulation.

Bugs remaining

Right now there is a worrying bug that causes the demo to get stuck when finishing the first move action. I will try to continue to research and debug this during the next week.

Things remaining

Because of the buggy nature of some packages and the lack of packages using the new gazebo, this caused that porting to Fortress took more time than expected and caused the addition of a teleoperated person in the simulation to be delayed.

So, for next week the focus will be in substituing the perception_asr package for new functions in the WaitPerson node, solving the bug explained above and adding the teleoperated person.