Outreachy 2015 students discussion (formerly GSoC 2015)

[130s]

Motivated students, please feel free to use this ticket for the open discussion about a potential GSoC project 2015 Gazebo mobile wheeled robot simulation on lunar deformable soil.

Private channel is also available (dev[a--t]opensource-robotics.tokyo.jp) if you wish, but we appreciate more the public discussion.

Thanks!!

[notokay]

Hi! My name is Tommy and, as I mentioned in the gazebo mailing list, I'm interested in contributing to the "Gazebo mobile wheeled robot simulation on lunar deformable soil" project as part of GSoC 2015!

I was reading a paper [1] that reviews a couple techniques that attempts to resolve issues in classical models of wheel-soil interaction dynamics and was originally more interested in the DLR soil contact model [2] it mentions that was developed by the German Aerospace Center because the papers cited seems to have a bit more implementation detail. However, now that I know that the project is for the Hakuto team that seems to be closely related to Tohoku University, I was wondering if there is a preference for the Tohoku University model [3] that was also outlined in [1]?

Thanks!

[1] Kobayashi, T., et al. "Current Status and Prospects of Terramechanics-based Simulation Techniques for Planetary Rover Locomotion." link
[2] Krenn, Rainer, and Andreas Gibbesch. "Soft soil contact modeling technique for multi-body system simulation." Trends in computational contact mechanics. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. 135-155. link
[3] Ishigami, Genya, et al. "Terramechanics‐based model for steering maneuver of planetary exploration rovers on loose soil." Journal of Field robotics 24.3 (2007): 233-250. link

[130s]

@notokay Thanks for the interest. And seems like you've already got a right track of the project! Yest the researchers in [1] and [3] are the ones we'll work closely once accepted (but not limited to). In your proposal, we also like to hear 1) your experience/coursework in dynamics that can be related to this project and 2) preferably rough idea of Gazebo implementation (e.g. do we implement this as a plugin? Or a separate physics engine? etc.). Ask more if anything is unclear. Thanks again!

[130s]

Thank you for the interest. We'll look forward to participating GSOC next year too and hopefully we'll keep it posted here (or Gazebo ML or somewhere else). Good luck on who's working on the project this year around!

[130s]

Someone showed an interest for this project for OSRF's Outreachy program application. So I reopen for the discussion.
Students with interests, please feel free for the open discussion about the project.

[angadhn]

Hi Isaac,

Sorry it has taken me a while to return to this. As mentioned, I am still interested in working on this project (even though Outreachy's deadline had passed a while back). I can't find too much about the project on this specific project. Could you perhaps share some of your resources here so I can develop a better understanding of what you're hoping to achieve in this project.

[130s]

Sorry for the delay. Outreachy has closed long ago and we have no plan for this project. But if @angadhn and/or anyone else is interested in working on, we are happy to be a part of it. More specifically, we (TORK):

• can definitely help implementation particularly for the framework such as ROS and Gazebo 3D simulator (we're very active users and contributors to both software projects).
• are not much familiar with the subject expertise, nor have opened discussion with the experts either (although we have a list of people we want to work with). So we appreciate anyone can take initiative here.

Let me know if any more info needed.

[angadhn]

I'm definitely interested in working on this. I have a background in mechanics which I presume will come good but I will need some initial guidance to help me get started. Any suggestions?

[angadhn]

So, I have been following the installation instructions on this page: https://github.com/tork-a/hakuto/blob/master/tetris_launch/doc/sysadmin.rst#run-the-web-simulator-server

I'm stuck on step 5 of section 4.2.2: specifically, when I run the last command:
./coarse_meshes.sh 50 http/client/assets/tetris/
I get the following error message:
Error: gzcoarse executable not found, exiting.
Any suggestions on fixing this would be much appreciated.

Also, I suggest making the installation of gzweb a separate subsection as right now it is in the 'install from source' section and I ended up missing the installation altogether. It would be a minor but helpful change, I think.

[angadhn]

Also, for step 6 in the same section, there are 2 issues.

1. the diff command has an error since there is no file SkyX_Moon.fragment.org in the specified folder. I did test out that the earth does show up in the simulator so that seems okay.
2. The link in the same step is also broken.