gzmaze is an attempt at flexing the power of Gazebo The main goal here is to generate a maze in gazebo from a text file.
There are two components, a GUI overlay plugin and a world plugin.
Gazebo has a tutorial on simple GUI overlays. I followed that tutorial, and extended it slightly. There are two buttons and a textedit. When the buttons are clicked, a message is published to the topic ~/maze/regenerate
This is where the meat of the code is. We subscribe to ~/maze/regenerate and build mazes using gazebo messages. This plugin took example from the gazebo Model editor. Essentially, it uses gazebo messages to construct Collision and Links. There links are then converted to and sdf::ElementPtr via the convenient funtions VisualToSDF and CollisionToSDF.
This code user to work with gazebo9, and but I've recently tested it with gazebo 11
cmake 2.8 Gazebo
To get the dependencies, you can probably just install from apt
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. && make
Be sure to add the following to your .gazebo/gui.ini file
[overlay_plugins]
filenames=libregenerate_widget.so
source setup.sh #this will setup the environment variables you need and run gazebo
gazebo --verbose gzmaze.world
look at sample_maze.mz for an example