clearpath_simulator

Setup

Prerequisites:

• Install ROS 2 Jazzy

Gazebo Harmonic

See Gazebo Installation for more information on installing Gazebo.

sudo apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-ros-gz

Workspace

mkdir ~/clearpath_ws/src -p
cd ~/clearpath_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/clearpath_simulator.git
cd ~/clearpath_ws
rosdep install -r --from-paths src -i -y
colcon build --symlink-install

Setup path

mkdir ~/clearpath

Copy your robot.yaml into ~/clearpath

Launch

ros2 launch clearpath_gz simulation.launch.py

Worlds

The clearpath_gz package includes several simulation worlds. To select a specific world, use the world launch parameter, e.g.

ros2 launch clearpath_gz simulation.launch.py world:=pipeline

Available worlds are:

World	Description	Screenshots	Geographic Location
construction	The same floorplan as the office world, but under construction. Features non-solid walls and debris piles.	link	Waterloo ON, Canada
office	The same floorplan as the construction world. Features narrow hallways, doorways, meeting rooms, and loading docks.	link	Waterloo ON, Canada
orchard	An outdoor, agricultural environment featuring rows of trees. The terrain has small slopes, but is mostly flat.	link	Nikea, Greece
pipeline	A rugged, outdoor environment featuring steeper hills, a river and bridge, a small cave, solar panels, and a pipeline.	link	Northern Alberta, Canada
solar_farm	An outdoor, agricultural environmentf featuring gentle hills, a barn, rows of solar panels, and fences.	link	Stonewall MB, Canada
warehouse (default)	A flat, indoor warehouse environment. Features shelves and people.	link	Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Creating Map Tiles

The orchard, pipeline, and solar_farm worlds include geotagged TIF images in the geotif directory. These images can be used to generate map tiles of the simulation environment, if desired.

To generate the tiles, first install the gdal-bin package:

sudo apt install gdal-bin

Then run the following command to generate the tiles:

gdal2tiles.py $(ros2 pkg prefix clearpath_gz)/share/clearpath_gz/geotif/WORLD_geo.tif

substituting WORLD with orchard, pipeline, or solar_farm.

The generated files will be located in the current working directory in a new directory called WORLD_geo (e.g. pipeline_geo).

Note that while the simulation worlds' locations have been chosen to be geographically similar to the envrionments depicted, the simulations are wholly fictional locations; the generated tiles will not mesh seamlessly into any satellite map of the region depicted.