Fleet Simulation Ecosystem

To simulate and assess the task allocation, scheduling and routing capabilites of the fleet manager, a collection of simulation related ROS packages have been developed in the ROOSTER fleet management ecosystem.

These packages include

• multi_ridgeback_gazebo and and multi_ridgeback_nav
• multi_husky_gazebo and multi_husky_nav

These packages have been built on top of simulation packages developed by Clearpath Robotics to simulate their robots ‘Ridgeback’ and ‘Husky’. The primary contribution of our packages is to facilitate a conflict-free multi-robot simulation by:

• Launching the localization, navigation, and other robot specific nodes in the correct namespace for each robot in the fleet
• Setting the correct tf (coordinate transformation) frame ids for the links of each robot

Note

Currently, only simulating Husky and Ridgeback is supported in ROOSTER. The platform can and will be extended to support more robots.

Additionally, multi_robot_sim package

• provides a GUI interface to choose and launch the desired type and number of robots to form the heterogenous fleet
• launches a gazebo simulation with the specified map and chosen robots
• launches rviz to visualize the laser scan data of the robots and their navigation paths