Hi there,
Has anyone tried using SITL with gazebo11 or the new Ignition Fortress?
I’m looking at using SITL in Ubuntu 20.04.
Thanks,
Germán
Hi @gecastro, welcome to the forum 
I haven’t used SITL much, and haven’t tried this.
Given our SITL docs specify to download Gazebo 7 or Gazebo 8, I doubt there’ll be many community members who have tried to do otherwise, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong on that.
I’ve passed on your question internally to our software team, in case they’ve tried out something like this, although it would likely be helpful if you could provide some more context behind your question (e.g. are there features there that you need that aren’t available in the earlier versions? are you after some kind of installation help/instructions? etc)
Generally speaking, I want to know if anyone has tried to reuse the code or get some advice.
More specific, I understand that the only plugin necessary to talk between gazebo and SITL is “add_link” mentioned in the installation instructions. This plugin does not compile with gazebo11 due to changes in some libraries. Probably the necessary changes to fix it are relatively minor.
Regarding Ignition, I’m not sure how difficult it would be to make the changes, since it’s a major refactoring of gazebo.
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Hello, @gecastro
The good news is that the latest version of Ignition Gazebo has the required plugins already: Buoyancy, Hydrodynamics and Thruster. These were basically upstreamed from the FFG and UUV projects.
Here’s a proof-of-concept: bluerov2_ignition
Caveats:
- You’ll need to build Ignition Gazebo from source to get support for ccw thrusters. This will eventually be released in Ignition Garden.
- It requires a fork of ardupilot_gazebo that sends messages to the Thruster plugins; this is the moral equivalent of the “add_link” branch. Once the dust settles I will see if I can upstream this change.
- The SDF files are very simple, but they do work. I would like to get them to better approximate the real BlueROV2 device.
Enjoy.
/Clyde
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