Simulator questions

[Omar Chavez Garcia]

Hi,

I'm a new member of this group and I hope we can help each other to enrich our experiences in working with the PR2.

I just started to work with the PR2, it seems a really nice platform. However, I can't use it all the time to test my approaches. I have read some of your topics and you suggest to use the simulator. 

So far, I have installed the needed packages to run gazebo and the pr2 simulator. However, it seems really slow despite the computing power I'm using. In addition, I can't make the teleop package work well, it only moves forward (with long delays) and stops working. I have checked the tutorials in the ROS webpages, and I have not got any errors, so maybe I'm missing a little tweak to make the simulator run better.

I have seen that we can use either gazebo or rviz to display the robot interactions. I'm using gazebo, I could not find a complete guide to put the ue  pr2simulator+rviz.

I will appreciate some hints or advises regarding this topic.

Another thing, I am planning on buying a new laptop to develop packages for the pr2. Clearly, this latop has to be powerful enough to deal with the simulator, however, I have seen that groovy is better suited for old versions of Ubuntu (now unsupported). Have you successfully installed groovy in new versions of Ubuntu (14.04.1 -- I use this release because of hardware incompatibilities with previous versions)?

Thanks in advance,

Omar

[Devon Ash]

Hi Omar,

The PR2 simulator is for Gazebo. RViz is the visualization of the pr2's robot model and its data. The data visualized in RViz is from the Gazebo world (if you're running it from Gazebo). RViz can visualize the real data if the real robot is being used.

Are you using ROS Hydro? I'm not sure why it would be slow. What versions of Gazebo, RViz are you working with and what are your hardware specs? Do you have a graphics card? What is it?

ROS does not support Groovy on 14.04 and Groovy wlil soon be EOL. Here's how the compatibility with ROS looks like:

ROS Indigo:

• Ubuntu Saucy (13.10)
• Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)

ROS Hydro :

• Ubuntu Precise (12.04 LTS)
• Ubuntu Quantal (12.10)
• Ubuntu Raring (13.04)

ROS Groovy:

• Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10)
• Ubuntu Precise (12.04 LTS)
• Ubuntu Quantal (12.10)

The reps page which i got this information from can be found here http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0003.html#groovy-galapagos-oct-2012

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[Omar Chavez Garcia]

Hi Devon,

First of all, sorry for the lack of information.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.10. I'm not using the graphics card (I had an error when trying to run gazebo, so I enabled a flag to use software-based acceleration instead) -- this could be the reason for the slow behavior. I have an Integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400, 8Gb RAM, Intel i7-4510U. It seems that Ubuntu 21.10 doesn't recognize the graphics card properly.

I decided to use Groovy in my laptop because Hydro is not ready for the PR2, and I don't want to have problems when testing my packages on the robot. The version of Gazebo is 1.7.3, rviz is 1.9.36.

Cheer

[Devon Ash]

Seems like that might be the issue (the software flag atleast). What was the error for Gazebo? It may have been a one time thing ; I've never experienced any issues with Gazebo speed except for computers that don't have graphics cards enabled.

Have you tried installing ROS Hydro for the PR2? The debians are on the ROS distro and on the pr2packages.clearpathrobotics.com deb server. We've been using ROS Hydro on our PR2 for about two months now. There were *some* bugs, and I've been fixing them as they arise, but otherwise should be a safe environment for you to develop code on. My only reason for pushing development on Hydro is that soon Groovy will be EOL'd and not distributed throughought the ROS servers anymore and I don't want your development to run into that roadblock.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pr2_users/c637c658-6b35-4381-bd17-b0a3d086c00c%40googlegroups.com.