Upgrade simulator for demos

[mkhansenbot]

Gazebo Fortress is a bit difficult to use due to the fact it was the version that started out as Ignition and then changed to Gazebo.

We should look at upgrading the demos. While we're at it, it would be good to look at O3DE, Isaac Sim or other high-performance simulators. The current mars_rover demo, for example is very slow.

[mkhansenbot]

Added to next milestone (proposed) humble-2024.04.0

[asimonov]

hi Matt,

sorry, i was not able to look at SpaceROS after last meeting in April.
but I am starting to do it now.

and this is my first question - which gazebo to use...

I have just realised this demo is on Fortress.
I think I need at least Garden to work with the Moon example model that I am interested in.
But looks like Gazebo Harmonic is out now and it is LTS.
So I will try examples I am working on with Harmonic...

Would you consider moving this Mars demo to Harmonic?

[Bckempa]

Hi @asimonov

For Gazebo we are currently following the recommended version for our base ROS version (as documented here by the Gazebo project) so we'll be sticking with Fortress for the July release and moving to Harmonic in the October release when we migrate to Jazzy, as discussed here.

We are also interested in other simulation environments beyond Gazebo.

[asimonov]

@Bckempa
I have done some naive upgrade of moveit2 and space_robots to Gazebo Harmonic.

for some reason rosdep does not install all dependencies for Harmonic automatically, probably because it is not official Humble simulator version. But I end up with both Fortress and Harmonic simulators in the docker in the end.

Mars demo does not run on Harmonic out of the box, so now trying to debug why.

[asimonov]

My upgrade to Gazebo Harmonic works with mars_rover demo. I did not check canadarm demo.

The change is spread over 3 repos: docker, demos and simulation.

docker:
5103c89

simulation:
space-ros/simulation@622cdc6
space-ros/simulation@622cdc6

demos:
asimonov/demos@68c9195
asimonov/demos@3a00ea1
space-ros/demos@68c9195

For some reason setting up env variable inside launch python does not work, so have to use this before launching:

export GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH=/home/spaceros-user/demos_ws/install/ros_gz_sim_demos/share:/home/spaceros-user/demos_ws/install/simulation/share/simulation/models:/home/spaceros-user/demos_ws/install/simulation/share

If there is interest in merge, we can discuss how to do it. I am not sure if the plan is to refactor docker images first or not...