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Quick start

Start an empty underwater environment using either

roslaunch uuv_gazebo_worlds empty_underwater_world.launch

or

roslaunch uuv_gazebo_worlds ocean_waves.launch

Spawn the remotely operated vehicle RexROV (find the robot description files in uuv_descriptions) as follows

roslaunch uuv_descriptions upload_rexrov.launch mode:=default x:=0 y:=0 z:=-20 namespace:=rexrov

for which mode stands for the configuration of the vehicle to be used. It is important to create the vehicles under a unique namespace to allow simulation of multiple vehicles in the same scenario.

You can start a velocity controller with a joystick teleoperation node as

roslaunch uuv_control_cascaded_pid joy_velocity.launch uuv_name:=rexrov model_name:=rexrov joy_id:=0

In this case model_name refers to the vehicle model, which can be different from the namespace. It is a necessary parameter to load the correct controller and thruster allocation matrix coefficients. The joystick ID is already set zero as default. To find the correct joystick index, you can install and run jstest-gtk.

Info

The mapping of the joystick teleoperation node is set as default for the XBox 360 controller. Remapping is possible by passing the correct indexes of the desired axes in the launch file located in the uuv_teleop.

Tip

Sometimes Gazebo takes a while to close. Try

killall -9 gzserver gzclient

in case that happens.