Add example of using ros-tool capability

[chfritz]

Simulator

• create or set up (Webots, OmniVerse (Isaac Sim)?, pyrobosim?) some sort of very simple robot simulator
  • battery
  • pose
  • charging yes/no

Use ROS Tool to

• subscribe:
  • battery
  • pose

Later add

• service call:
  • return to dock
• publish
  • color for imagined LED strip?
  • nav goal?

[jlurgo]

Related:
We can have:

• react transitive icons for battery state, connectivity, etc. with configurable topics and maybe handlers or transform functions
• react transitive buttons, where you set up a topic, a caption and maybe a custom message payload if needed and you can create a "send to dock" or "open lid" button in a few lines.
  • if we want the button to reflect the progress of the action (i.e spinner while docking) we'll need to add some ROS action client message handling

[chfritz]

I needed to debug something in ros-tool, so I added some starter code for this. This is WIP but FYI and JIC: https://github.com/chfritz/transact/tree/ros-tool. Not ready for merging yet, but soon.

[chfritz]

In terms of simulators:

I was able to add to install gazebo in the example docker image (set to base-image ros:iron) by adding

RUN apt-get install -y ros-iron-leo-simulator ros-iron-turtlebot3-gazebo

(probably more than required) to https://github.com/transitiverobotics/example-robot-docker/blob/create_image/Dockerfile. I then ran xhost + on my machine and started the container with
-e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix. After that I was able to start ignition in headless mode using ign gazebo -s -v 1 -r visualize_lidar.sdf.

After that I was able to follow the steps in https://docs.ros.org/en/iron/Tutorials/Advanced/Simulators/Gazebo/Gazebo.html#configuring-ros-2 to connect ignition to ros2, but this is all awfully complicated (thanks ros2!) and the world I loaded doesn't seem to contain a camera either, so not a good fit for demoing teleop.

I'll try ros:noetic + ros-noetic-leo-gazebo-worlds next.

[chfritz]

For reference, on my host machine this works right away:

roslaunch /opt/ros/noetic/share/leo_gazebo/launch/worlds/leo_marsyard2022_world.launch

and it readily provides a camera topic we can use in Transitive:

[chfritz]

Added it to this branch https://github.com/transitiverobotics/example-robot-docker/tree/leo_gazebo.

Usage:

./run.sh userId robotToken

On my machine I can then start gazebo without gui like this:

roslaunch /opt/ros/noetic/share/leo_gazebo/launch/worlds/leo_marsyard2022_world.launch gui:=false

but that's not yet working in the above branch. Will try more tomorrow or maybe you can figure this out.

[chfritz]

If we ever want to revisit the simulator, this was just posted on ROS Discourse: https://discourse.ros.org/t/tools-to-use-other-simulators-as-an-alternative-to-gazebo/40556. Especially https://github.com/hijimasa/isaac-ros2-control-sample could be useful.