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Simulation of the Boston Dynamics Spot Robot using ROS2 and Ignition Gazebo (Fortress) on a Lunar Surface

Adaption of champ quadruped robot to ROS2 and Ignition Gazebo. Previously, the Boston Dynamics Spot robot was only simulated using ROS2 with Gazebo Classic, which goes end-of-life in January 2025. This package, modified from quadruped_ros2, simulates the Spot robot in Ignition Gazebo, a newer version of Gazebo. This combination of simulating the Spot robot with ROS2 and Ignition Gazebo on an open-source platform has not been done yet. Additionally, the Spot robot is also spawned on Rviz, where its joints are visible and able to be controlled locally.

Package Information

  • champ: includes configurations for the quadruped's kinematics/movement
  • champ_base: includes configurations for the quadruped's specific state and controllers
  • champ_bringup: includes the controller yaml files and launch files
  • champ_description: contains meshes model configs for three robots (inluding Spot)
  • champ_gazebo: contains world/environment configs
  • champ_msgs: contains info about robot messages

How to Install

  1. Make sure you have ROS2 and Ignition Gazebo (Fortress) downloaded. This version uses ROS2 Humble.

  2. Make your workspace:

mkdir my_ws
cd my_ws
mkdir src
cd my_ws/src
  1. Clone the repository into your source folder.
git clone [link to this repository]

How to run

  1. Source your ROS2 distribution.
source /opt/ros/${ROS_DISTRO}/setup.bash
  1. Source your workspace.
source ~/my_ws/install/setup.bash
  1. Run the launch file.
ros2 launch champ_bringup champ_bringup.launch.py

With this, Ignition Gazebo and RViz will both launch.

How to change worlds/environments

  • In the launch file (champ_bringup.launch.py), there are multiple world configurations to change between. When launching the Ignition Gazebo world, simply change the name of file path.

How to add a new environment:

  • In champ_gazebo/worlds, add a .sdf file along with the necessary meshes with the correct path directory.
  • In the launch file, add a file path to your .sdf and launch it with Ignition Gazebo. See examples in launch file.

Examples

For different environments, see previous section.

  1. Spot Robot in ground plane (simple surface, just a plane)
  2. Spot Robot in rocky lunar surface (has varying heights)

Details of Configurations

To see the topics to configure the controllers, run the following commands:

This shows the links/joints of the robot.

ros2 run tf2_tools view_frames

This shows the nodes/topics to send information to make the robot walk.

ros2 run rqt_graph rqt_graph

(Working to modify the Twist command with /vox_nav/cmd_vel topic configure controllers and make robot walk in Gazebo)

Contributions

Modified from https://github.com/jediofgever/quadruped_ros2.

Contributor is Diya Agarwal, an undergraduate student at Caltech. This research was conducted at Florida International University's Applied Research Center, under Dr. Dwayne McDaniel.