Building a Simulated Robot

This topic describes how to create an SDF file that defines a robot to be simulated in Gazebo Fortress and integrated with MOV.AI.

Robots models are defined by SDF files.

SDF (Simulation Description Format) is an XML format that was originally developed as part of the Gazebo robot simulator. It describes the simulation of a robot model and an environment scene for robot simulators, including visualization and control. See http://sdformat.org/ for more details.

• Robots – SDFormat enables you to accurately describe all aspects of a robot (joints and links) regardless of whether the robot is a simple chassis with wheels or a humanoid. It also describes a wide variety of robot properties, such as kinematic and dynamic attributes, sensors, surface properties, textures and joint friction. These features allow you to use SDF for both simulation, visualization, motion planning and robot control.

• Sensors and Controllers – In order to enable full simulation and control of your robot, sensors and controllers must be added to these SDF files as described in this document. MOV.AI supports most of the sensors and controllers that are used in the ROS community and describes how to integrate them in your robot’s simulation.

For details about how to define an SDF file that defines your robot and its environment for MOV.AI integration, see Creating an SDF File

Note – Gazebo Fortress has its own documentation that describes how to create a scene and a simple robot (without any sensors). You can https://Ignitionrobotics.org/docs and https://Ignitionrobotics.org/docs/fortress/building_robot for details. However, the document you’re reading provides a lot more functionality, descriptions and detail.