Monday, June 09, 2008
Gazebo
It's been a long while since an update, but we're alive. Really. Well, most of us are.
Anyhow, one thing that made significant progress last Fall was getting Gazebo up and running. It's a custom build of v0.5.2. Thanks again to CU Denver for the suggestion in 2005. Here's a screenshot, before I continue:
Shown in the picture is actually a default "world" packaged with Gazebo, but we've changed the model out to look/behave like our sub, down to the visual details of our hydrophones, Seabotix motors, and the aluminum framing. I unfortunately only have scale drawings of the center portion of the pool, which is not where we operate, so a more accurate environment is not in the foreseeable future.
The physics are something of a hack, since ODE lacked any sort of buoyancy calculations. It nevertheless seems to be qualitatively good, and therefore useful for testing out the clients. For that matter, the rendering of the water is somewhat silly, too, merely being alpha-blended billboards. Volumetric fogging would be the next step, but time is always short, so further updates will wait until the Fall.
There has not been time to add sonar support yet, but the main concern there right now is the robustness of the hardware, so, until that is nailed down, the simulator would have to remain very fluid. ¶ MichaelP @ 12:57
Anyhow, one thing that made significant progress last Fall was getting Gazebo up and running. It's a custom build of v0.5.2. Thanks again to CU Denver for the suggestion in 2005. Here's a screenshot, before I continue:
Shown in the picture is actually a default "world" packaged with Gazebo, but we've changed the model out to look/behave like our sub, down to the visual details of our hydrophones, Seabotix motors, and the aluminum framing. I unfortunately only have scale drawings of the center portion of the pool, which is not where we operate, so a more accurate environment is not in the foreseeable future.
The physics are something of a hack, since ODE lacked any sort of buoyancy calculations. It nevertheless seems to be qualitatively good, and therefore useful for testing out the clients. For that matter, the rendering of the water is somewhat silly, too, merely being alpha-blended billboards. Volumetric fogging would be the next step, but time is always short, so further updates will wait until the Fall.
There has not been time to add sonar support yet, but the main concern there right now is the robustness of the hardware, so, until that is nailed down, the simulator would have to remain very fluid. ¶ MichaelP @ 12:57
