Yarp Based Plugins for Gazebo Simulator

This paper presents a set of plugins for the Gazebo simulator that enables the interoperability between a robot, controlled using the YARP framework, and Gazebo itself. Gazebo is an open-source simulator that can handle different Dynamic Engines (ODE, DART, Bullet, SimBody), backed up by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and supported by a very large community. Since our plugins conform with the YARP layer used on the real robot, applications written for our robots, COMAN and iCub, can be run on the simulator with no changes. Our plugins have two main components: a YARP interface with the same API as the real robot interface, and a Gazebo plugin which handles simulated joints, encoders, IMUs, force/torque sensors and synchronization. The robot model is provided to the simulator by means of an SDF file, which describes all the geometric, dynamic and visual characteristics of a robot. Once the SDF is read from Gazebo, our plugins are loaded and associated with the simulated robot model and the simulated world. Different modules for COMAN and iCub have been developed using Gazebo and our plugins as a testbed: joint impedance control plus gravity compensation, dual arm Cartesian control for manipulation tasks, dynamic walking, etc. This work has been developed as part of a joint effort between three different European Projects “WALKMAN”, “CoDyCo” and “SoftHands” aiming at implementing a common simulation platform to develop and test algorithms for our robotic platforms. This work is available as open-source to all the researchers in the YARP community (https://github.com/robotology/gazebo_yarp_plugins).