Control Simulator

This repository contains a simulator for IARC mission 8. It provides a map the size of a basketball court, enemy drone and up to Ascend drones. It's purpose is to provide a playground for testing control systems such as state machine, obstacle avoidance and path-planning.

Quickstart

Download repository

This repository is set up as a ROS package. Clone it into your catkin workspace. Note that there are a couple of submodules here, so it should be cloned using

# Either use this:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/AscendNTNU/control_simulator.git

# Or use this:
git clone https://github.com/AscendNTNU/control_simulator.git
cd control_simulator
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build simulator

After installing into the catkin workspace, build and source it using standard ROS procedures.

catkin build    # catkin_make should also work fine
source devel/setup.bash

Run simulator

Use roslaunch to start the simulator.

roslaunch control_simulator main.launch

main.launch will start a normal gazebo instance with gui.

Troubleshooting

ODOM: Ex:

This isn't strictly related to control_simulator, but as of early 2019, there seems to be a bug in MAVROS odometry plugin causing it to crash. This means that the drones wont know their position and believe they start in the origin. The only solution I've found is to manually install an older version of mavros from source. Version 0.26.1 works, but it is worth trying newer versions as well.

mavlink_sitl_gazebo failed to build

If you get an error about twist_covariance not being defined or member of a class, read on. This isn't strictly related to control_simulator, but it is caused by changes in its external dependencies, specifically sitl_gazebo and mavlink. Open the file which doesn't compile and rename all instances of twist_covariance to velocity_covariance (should only be 2 places).

Depending on what version of mavlink is installed this error may or may not ocour, so it is hard to see a generic solution without enforcing a specific mavlink version.