rov_bus

A ROS package containing files required to visualise an underwater vehicle in RViz and Gazebo. This package is a dependency for rov_bus_control.

About the ROV and pool design

The ROV has been named Bus because it looks like one. ROV Bus is equipped with 4 thrusters and a head camera. It exhibits 3 degrees of freedom (3-DoF).

• Heave (translation in z-direction; towards pool bed is positive)
• Yaw (rotation about z-axis; counterclockwise is positive)
• Surge (translation in x-direction; the camera points in positive direction)

This package also contains a swimming pool (Gazebo world) with a gate and an obstacle in front of it.

Resources referred and used:

• To simulate underwater conditions: freefloating-gazebo.
• Paper released by author of freefloating-gazebo.
• To find out the center of buoyancy, the following links were referred:
  • Link 1
  • Link 2
• T100 thrusters CAD model from BlueRobotics.
• For keyboard operation, this code snippet was referred.

Gazebo's own hydrodynamics plugin was not opted because the plugin uses the bounding box around mesh of collision model to calculate the buoyant force. The results were accurate only when simple shapes like cuboid, sphere, and cylinder were used.

Commands

To view the ROV in RViz

roslaunch rov_bus display-rviz.launch

To view just the pool in Gazebo

roslaunch rov_bus pool-display.launch

To view the ROV in Gazebo world

roslaunch rov_bus rov_bus.launch