Building software system and simulation environment for RoboCup MSL Soccer robots based on ROS and Gazebo

Abstract

This chapter presents the lesson learned during constructing the software system and simulation environment for our RoboCup Middle Size League (MSL) robots. The software is built based on ROS, thus the advantages of ROS such as modularity, portability and expansibility are inherited. The tools provided by ROS, such as RVIZ, rosbag, rqt_graph just to name a few, can improve the efficiency of development. Furthermore, the standard communication mechanism (topic and service) and software organization method (package and meta-package) introduces the opportunity for sharing codes among the RoboCup MSL community, which is a fundamental issue to forming hybrid teams. As known, to evaluate new algorithms for multi-robot collaboration on real robots is expensive, which can be done in a proper simulation environment. Particularly, it would be nice if the ROS based software can also be applied to control the simulated robots. As a result, the open source simulator Gazebo is selected, which offers a convenient interface with ROS. In this case, a Gazebo based simulation environment is constructed to visualize the robots and simulate their motions. Furthermore, the simulation has also been used to evaluate new multi-robot collaboration algorithms for our NuBot RoboCup MSL robot team.