ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Adding a 3D vision sensor to Gazebo

In Gazebo, we can simulate the robot movement and its physics; other than that, we can simulate sensors too.

To build a sensor in Gazebo, we have to model the behavior of that sensor in Gazebo. There are some prebuilt sensor models in Gazebo that can be used directly in our code without writing a new model.

Here, we are adding a 3D vision sensor called the Asus Xtion Pro model in Gazebo. The sensor model is already implemented in the gazebo_ros_pkgs/gazebo_plugins ROS package, which we already installed in our ROS system.

Each model in Gazebo is implemented as Gazebo-ROS plugins, which can be loaded by inserting into the URDF file.

Here is how we include a Gazebo definition and physical robot model of Xtion ...