In a previous post I talked about the RoDI educational robot and the rodi_robot package I wrote to control it within the Robot Operating System (ROS).

The problem was that having access to a RoDI was the only way to thinker with it. And although it has a very low cost (and is one of the cheapest with ROS support), it would be nice to learn how to control RoDI even without having access to one.

So since I’m using the Gazebo simulator while learning about ROS, I thought that adding support for RoDI in Gazebo would be an excellent opportunity to learn more about its internals.

The rodi_gazebo project implements both a Gazebo model for RoDI and a plugin that mimics the robot’s default firmware rodi-web HTTP API. This means that there’s no difference from a client point of view to communicate with either a real RoDI or a simulated one in Gazebo.

I want to thank Gary who helped me integrating the RoDI STL into the model and answered tons of questions about Gazebo  🙂

The README file explains how to build the plugin and use the RoDI model, I hope this could be useful for the RoDI community.

Happy hacking!