Gazebo Newsletter 10 June 2018

We have started to focus our development efforts on the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Here is a write up about the challenge, originally posted on the Open Robotics blog:

If you haven't already heard of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (or "SubT"), it's time to start paying attention.

With SubT, DARPA "aims to develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground. The SubT Challenge will explore new approaches to rapidly map, navigate, search, and exploit complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks."

DARPA announced SubT back in December, but Program Manager Dr. Timothy Chung recently announced that Open Robotics has been charged with creating and running the simulated track of the challenge.

Unlike our involvement in the DARPA Robotics Challenge in which we created a simulated environment in Gazebo for a single robot – the Atlas, SubT allows for a wide variety of robot participants.

You can read more about it in today's Wired: DARPA'S Next Challenge? A Grueling Underground Journey

DARPA will be announcing more details at the SubT Challenge kickoff in Fall 2018.

Community Contributions

We'd like to thank the following people for their contributions to Gazebo.

• Mrunmayi Mungekar
  • Ctrl+S now opens SaveAs dialog for freshly saving file
• Olivier Crave
  • Stop the world from a plugin
  • Add command to send messages on a topic with gz
  • Add methods to set dynamically Gaussian noise parameters

Releases

The following list includes releases made over the past month.

• Gazebo 9.1.1
• Gazebo 8.2.0
• Gazebo 7.13.0
• Ignition Common 1.1.1
• Ignition Common 2.0.0~pre1
• Ignition Fuel Tools 1.2.0
• Ignition Cmake 0.6.0
• Ignition Cmake 1.0.0~pre3
• Ignition Msgs 2.0.0~pre3
• Ignition Transport 5.0.0~pre1

Tip of the month

Visualization markers allow you to insert and modify shapes into Gazebo's 3D scene at runtime. For example, you can draw line segments to visualize the path of a mobile robot, or add custom sensor data visualizations.

Visualization markers are accessible through the "/marker" service on Ignition Transport which accepts a marker.proto message.

The following example program will help you get started: https://github.com/osrf/gazebo/blob/master/examples/stand_alone/marker/.

Featured Model

The featured model this month is a traffic light. The lights on this model can be turned on by setting their emissive color either via SDF or programmatically. Take a look at this pull request for an example of traffic light control.

Bugs

• Open
  • Gazebo(1187)
  • SDFormat(111)
• Critical
  • Gazebo(41)
  • SDFormat(1)

Questions and Answers

Most recent active questions

• Actor and LiDAR sensor problems
• What was the philosophy behind developing Gazebo ?
• How to call gazebo_msg/GetLinkState service for a sensor mounted on a robot?
• What inertia and mass values should I set for environment (grass, sidewalks, houses...)?