DISCOWER Astrobee Simulation Components

The DISCOWER Astrobee Simulation package contains the following components:

• KTH Space Robotics Lab Gazebo World
• DISCOWER Free Flyers Model, including mesh files
• DISCOWER Free Flyers Gazebo Plugins: thrusters, PX4 SITL
• DISCOWER Launch files

Installation

Make sure that you have ROS Humble installed on your system. Support for ROS Foxy was not tested. Make sure that you have SSH Keys synced with GitHub. If you don't have SSH Keys, follow this tutorial to generate them.

0. Install all dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential git

1. Clone DISCOWER Astrobee Simulation into a clean workspace

cd ~/.
mkdir discower_ws
cd discower_ws/
git clone git@github.com:DISCOWER/astrobee.git src

2. Update the submodules the workspace

cd src/
git submodule update --init --depth 1 description/media
git submodule update --init discower
git submodule update --init --recursive submodules/px4

3. Install all dependencies

cd scripts/setup
./add_ros_repository.sh
sudo apt-get update
cd sources
./build_install_sources.sh
cd ../
./install_desktop_packages.sh
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

4. Build the workspace with colcon build --symlink-install (Note: for systems with 16GB of RAM or less, use colcon build --symlink-install --executor sequential)

cd ~/discower_ws/
colcon build --symlink-install

5. Source the workspace

source install/local_setup.bash

6. Make sure that you have the following Gazebo paths in your system:

export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=${GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH}:$HOME/discower_ws/src/submodules/px4/build/px4_sitl_default/build_gazebo-classic
export GAZEBO_RESOURCE_PATH=/usr/share/gazebo-11

to ensure that the PX4 plugins are found by Gazebo.

Usage

To launch the simulation, run the following command:

ros2 launch discower sim.launch.py

This simulation should spawn one free-flyer (Orion) into the workspace with a SITL window running on the same terminal.