Bridges between ROS TF messages and Robot Scene Graph Nodes

Overview

Bridges between ROS TF messages and Robot Scene Graph Nodes

Dependencies

• ROS Hydro
• BRICS_3D library with HDF5 support. Installation instructions can be found here: http://www.best-of-robotics.org/brics_3d/installation.html
• Open Scene Graph (optional, recommended)

Compilation

 $ catkin_make -DUSE_OSG=ON

Environment Variables

Please make sure the following environment variables are set. (The should be )

Dependencies to BRICS_3D and HDF5:

Name	Description
BRICS_3D_DIR	Points to the installation folder of BRICS_3D. Used within the CMake scripts to discover the BRICS_3D library.
HDF5_ROOT	Points to the installation folder of HDF5. Use it in case it is not into installed to the default folders.

Usage

To start the example do the following:

rosparam set /enable_dot_visualizer true
rosparam set /root_frame_id "wgs84"
rosrun sherpa_world_model_tf_bridge sherpa_world_model_tf_bridge

On another terminal start the simulated robots with:

rosrun sherpa_world_model_tf_bridge robot_1_tf_broadcasr.py 
rosrun sherpa_world_model_tf_bridge robot_2_tf_broadcasr.py 

The scene can be viewed in the Open Scene Graph window (if proper compile time flags have been set) and the rviz visualization tool as provided by ROS side by side:

For debugging purposes the resulting Robot Scene Graph is stored in a dot file format (current_graph.gv).
It can be rendered with the dot tool that is part of the graphviz package e.g.

	dot current_graph.gv -Tsvg -o current_graph.gv.svg

Parameters

Parameters can be configured with the rosparam tool. The following parameters are available:

Prameter name	Default	Description
root_frame_id	"base_link"	Only TF frames below this root ID are considered within the bridge.
enable_dot_visualizer	false	If set to true dot files are generated for every update on the RSG.

Examples are:

rosparam set /enable_dot_visualizer true
rosparam set /root_frame_id "wgs84"

Licensing

This software is published under a dual-license: GNU Lesser General Public License LGPL 2.1 and Modified BSD license. The dual-license implies that users of this code may choose which terms they prefer. Please see the files called LGPL-2.1 and BSDlicense.

Impressum

Written by Sebastian Blumenthal ([email protected]) Last update: 19.06.2015