Simulation of the weeding robot in Gazebo.
To run the simulation use launch/gazebo.launch. This launcher loads the robot model from the xacro file urdf/gazebo.xacro, which in turn uses the robot description from the package weed_robot_description. If the parameter value meshes:=false is used, a simplified model consisting of basic geometric shapes is loaded, which makes the simulation considerably less resource-consuming.
The src/world_odom_publisher.cpp node was implemented that publishes the ground-truth of the odometry obtained from the actual robot location in Gazebo.
The folder meshes contains 3D meshes in STL format of 3 soybean plants of different sizes and shapes. These meshes are separated in subfolders by resolution level. The simulation scenarios worlds/field_plants.world and worlds/field_small_plants.world use these meshes in their lower resolution version.
The script utils/world_generator.py can be used to generate world simulation scenarios. Field characteristics such as dimensions, headlands, furrow widths, etc. can be configured. On the other hand, crop rows can be generated with simple boxes or with plant meshes and the soil can be generated with or without using texture.
The package ackermann_steering_controller is used for the control of the robot. It subscribes to the topic /ackermann_steering_controller/cmd_vel where messages of type geometry_msgs/Twist Message are received. Of these messages only the linear.x and angular.z components are used, the rest are ignored.
To command the robot with the keyboard the package teleop_twist_keyboard can be used redirecting the topic in which it publishes as follows:
$ rosrun teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard.py cmd_vel:=/ackermann_steering_controller/cmd_vel