Could Someone Give me Advice on Implementing Custom Sensors in Gazebo?

General
1

Hello there,

I am new to Gazebo and have been experimenting with creating custom simulations for a robotics project. My team and I are currently working on a project that involves simulating a complex environment; and we need to implement custom sensors that are not available in the standard Gazebo library.

Specifically; we are looking to develop a sensor that can detect both magnetic fields and sound waves in the simulation environment. While we have found some basic tutorials on adding custom sensors; the information we have come across seems a bit fragmented; and we are struggling to get a comprehensive understanding of the process.

What are the best practices for developing a new sensor plugin in Gazebo? Are there any recommended resources or templates that we should refer to?

How do we efficiently manage and output data from these custom sensors? We aim to visualize the data in real-time and also store it for post simulation analysis.

Our project also involves ROS integration. How can we ensure that our custom sensor data is compatible with ROS; and what are the common pitfalls to avoid in this process? :thinking:

Since we are dealing with complex phenomena like magnetic fields and sound waves; accuracy is crucial. Are there any specific considerations or techniques in Gazebo to enhance the realism and accuracy of these sensor readings? :thinking:

Also; I have gone through this post; http://answers.gazebosim.org/question/13966/examples-of-registering-a-custom-sensor-not-plugin-uipath/ which definitely helped me out a lot,

We are excited to learn and improve our simulation capabilities and believe that the collective expertise of this community could be invaluable to our project.

Thank you in advance for your help and assistance. :innocent:

2

Your question is extremely broad and touches on more than one aspect of developing a plugin. A lot of what you ask for is really up to you.

Can I check with you if you are using Gazebo Classic or GazeboSim?

For the latter, I think you can just get away with writing a System and implementing a PostUpdate function that publishes data over gz-transport (recommended) or directly publishes via ros2. The exact choice here depends on how much data you plan on publishing and what your downstream use case is (research prototype or production grade?).