Cymulator: Gazebo based Simulator for CyPhyHouse

Cymulator is a Gazebo based simulation environment for CyPhyHouse project. In Cymulator, the same distributed Koord program along with our middleware can be deployed to multiple simulated drones and cars in Gazebo simulator. You can test and visualize your distributed robot control algorithms without buying drones and cars!

Website and Documentation

Cymulator is part of the CyPhyHouse project and currently not executable as a standalone application. Please visit following websites for detail usage.

Broad overview of CyPhyHouse project is available at:

https://cyphyhouse.github.io/

Or you can visit our website for documentation:

https://cyphyhouse.rtfd.io/

License

Cymulator is licensed under the terms of the NCSA License (see the file LICENSE).

Installation

The installation steps below are assembled in installation/install-noetic.sh which we tested on Ubuntu 20.04. We also provide scripts for few different combinations of ROS, Gazebo, and Ubuntu versions under installation/ folder. These commands requires sudo permission. Please run them with caution.

1. Install ROS Noetic with Gazebo 11 and create a workspace for catkin. We assume it is under cym_ws.

   • Ubuntu Install of ROS Noetic
     • Desktop-Full Install: (Recommended) : Everything in Desktop plus 2D/3D simulators and 2D/3D perception packages
   • Creating a workspace for catkin

2. Install required ROS packages available on APT

   sudo apt install -y \
       ros-noetic-ackermann-msgs ros-noetic-geographic-msgs \
       ros-noetic-eigen-stl-containers \
       ros-noetic-ros-control ros-noetic-ros-controllers \
       ros-noetic-hector-models \
       ros-noetic-geometry2 ros-noetic-robot

3. Install other system packages available on APT

   sudo apt install -y git
   sudo apt install -y cppad coinor-libipopt-dev  # For MPC controller
   sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip

4. Install required Python packages available on PyPI

   pip3 install --user pip --upgrade
   pip3 install --user \
        catkin_pkg rospkg \
        empy numpy scipy \
        defusedxml netifaces \
        pathlib pyyaml \
        vcstool

Clone required Git repositories

6. Inside the cym_ws/src directory, clone Cymulator repository. Then, clone dependent git repositories specified in vcstool.repos.yml using vcstool:

   git clone https://github.com/cyphyhouse/Cymulator.git --branch master
   vcs import --input Cymulator/vcstool.repos.yml

Alternatively, you can manually clone the repositories at the versions specified in vcstool.repos.yml without using vcstool.

Compile using catkin_make

7. Run these commands under your cym_ws directory to compile relevant ROS packages in the cloned repositories.

   source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
   catkin_make --only-pkg-with-deps cym_gazebo  # Build only packages required by cym_gazebo

(Alternative) Compile using colcon

Colcon is an alternative build system used by Amazon AWS RoboMaker. Here are the commands to build with colcon.

7. Run these commands under your cym_ws directory to compile only relevant ROS packages in cym_ws/src.

   source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
   colcon build --base-paths src/* --packages-up-to cym_gazebo

(Optional) Additional Gazebo Worlds

You can download other Gazebo worlds. Cymulator relies on ROS Gazebo package to load Gazebo simulator, and it should be able to load your custom world. Some interesting world files from other opensource projects are provided below

• https://docs.px4.io/master/en/simulation/gazebo_worlds.html