ROS package for creating Gazebo environments from 2D maps

Subscribes to your map topic and exports a mesh for use in Gazebo in the destination folder you specify. The mesh will have obstacles (tall boxes) corresponding to all occupied map squares. Requires a map to be publishing somewhere, and will probably work better if the map is static; I recommend using map_server with a saved map.

If run with default parameters, it will write the mesh to this package's models/map/meshes folder. You will then be able to run gazebo_world.launch to launch Gazebo pre-populated with the map mesh.

Arguments and parameters

The export directory is specified as a launchfile argument. Change it using

roslaunch map2gazebo map2gazebo.launch export_dir:=/path/to/export_dir

Note that if you change the export directory, gazebo_world.launch will not work unmodified.

Default parameters are specified in config/defaults.yaml; the location of the YAML parameter file is also a launchfile argument. To change the defaults, make a new YAML parameter file, and run

roslaunch map2gazebo map2gazebo.launch params_file:=/path/to/your/params.yaml

Alternatively you could just edit the default parameter file (not recommended, but I can't stop you).

YAML parameters:

• map_topic: Topic that the map to convert is being published on.
• mesh_type: Can be "stl" or "dae"; sets whether to export the mesh as a stl (default) or as a Collada file. Note that dae files specify a color and that by default this color is black, which you will likely want to edit as it makes your world very hard to see. If exporting as dae, you will also need to modify models/map/model.sdf to specify map.dae instead of map.stl if you are planning to use gazebo_world.launch.
• occupied_thresh: Minimum threshold value for considering a cell occupied. Defaults to 1 (out of 100).
• box_height: Height of boxes in gazebo environment. Defaults to 2m.

The YAML file does not specify the export directory because it doesn't seem to support a value with substitution args like "$(find map2gazebo)/models/map/meshes", which is the desired default value. The roslaunch <arg> and <param> tags are therefore used, but unfortunately the <param> tag overrides any non-default value loaded from the YAML file. Therefore, don't use the YAML parameter file to set a non-default export directory. (Let me know, or better submit a PR, if you know of a more elegant way to do this!)

Installation

Clone the repo and install ROS dependencies with rosdep.

Install the python dependencies with pip:

pip3 install --user trimesh
pip3 install --user numpy

trimesh needs the following soft dependencies to export Collada (.dae) files. Theoretically you can install these with pip install trimesh[soft] but this failed for me, so I installed the needed ones myself.

pip3 install --user pycollada
pip3 install --user scipy
pip3 install --user networkx