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Image Credit: Scottish Enterprise / Rob McDougall

V-REPin’

V-REP allows the use of ROS through a dedicated interface, RosInterface, which is part of the V-REP API framework. By duplicating the C/C++ ROS API, V-REP can act as a ROS node and enables communication via ROS topics.

In order to do this, the interface has to be installed.

Installation

To install the interface, please follow Coppellia’s RosInterface installation instructions located in /$VREP_ROOT/programming/ros_packages.

Before compiling the interface, you have to tell V-REP that you will be using custom messages. This is relatively easy to do and can be done by adding the desired messages to the messages.txt file located in the meta folder of your RosInterface folder, prior to compiling the interface.

In our case:

marty_msgs/ServoMsg
marty_msgs/ServoMsgArray
marty_msgs/Accelerometer

Entering Simulation Mode

Now that the interface has been installed, the ros_marty package has to be set to simulation mode. Two files have to be edited: config.cfg and marty.launch.

Let’s do config.cfg first. This file is located within ../ros_marty/cfg and, thankfully, the change to be made is simple. Set the false variable to true:

simulated: false     # Whether Marty is being simulated

Next, let’s edit marty.launch. This file is located in the launch folder of your ros_marty package. Again, the change is relatively simple, set the false variable to true:

<param name="use_sim_time" value="false"/> <!-- Enable if Simulated -->

Now, instead of using a “real-time” clock, it will use the simulator’s timing system. This is important as V-REP can be sped up or slowed down.