Running simulation of the Summit X_WAM platform

[crichardson332]

Hello, I work in a research lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, and we have a summit x-wam robot, this one here:

https://www.robotnik.eu/new-mobile-manipulator-concept-x-wam/

We're trying to get it up and running again in order to develop and test some of our algorithms in stochastic optimal control and machine learning. We need to get a simulation environment to test with. Right now we have the following repos cloned in our catkin workspace

• summit_xl_sim
• summit_xl_common
• summit_x_common
• summit_x_robot
• robotnik_sensors
• robotnik_msgs
• robot_localization_utils
• costmap_prohibition_layer

Will we be able to run simulations for the summit x-wam, including the omni-directional wheels, scissor mechanism, and manipulator? Are the resources available and functional for this? I've tried running some of the summit_xl_sim scenarios and I'm having compatibility issues with xacro and the urdf models, but we can always work through those. We just want to make sure that it's even possible to get a simulation up and running of the x-wam robot.

Thanks!

[RomanRobotnik]

Hi,

Good to hear you are going to get it up again!

Could you tell me which ROS distro are you using?

Thanks.

[crichardson332]

Thanks for the quick response!

I'm running Ubuntu 18 with melodic, which is what pretty much everyone will be running on their machines. Some people might still be running kinetic on older lab computers, but at this point most people have upgraded.

[RomanRobotnik]

Ok! Though I meant what's the version running in the robot?

The point is that the robot version is no longer available and the upgrade can be done but it's as simple as with other robots.

We are currently working with Kinetic.

[crichardson332]

Oh ok the robot is currently still running Ubuntu 12, and I believe ros Hydro. I can double check that though.

So I assume it would be best to not update the robot and keep it on Hydro and Ubuntu 12? Will there be any way for us to run desktop simulations (without the physical robot) for the X-WAM platform? I can use docker images or a VM to run Ubuntu 12 and Hydro if that makes it feasible. I would just need to figure out the Gazebo and rviz stuff in those environments, particularly in docker.