This is an update to my previous post on setting up an iRobot Create/Roomba in Gazebo/ROS for the new ROS distro Indigo.
Steps :
1. Follow the ROS instruction guidelines for Indigo installation [follow ros.org]
2. Setup your catkin workspace (again instructions in ROS wiki)
3. ROS Indigo should automatically install Gazebo 2.x
4. Start here for tutorials on working with ROS and Gazebo. Complete all the tutorials http://gazebosim.org/tutorials
5. Download the iRobot Create SDF from the online repo. It is possible to download the entire library of models from https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models
6. Put the “create” folder from the downloaded models into your ~/catkin_ws/src/ directory
7. Insert the differential drive plugin into the model-1_4.sdf file. The plugin can be found here . Problem here is that the plugin has tags which are not required. I am attaching the modified sdf file. (download and change extension to .sdf, replace the original model-1_4.sdf file with the new file).
Assuming you completed all the steps above(use the provided sdf file), here are the instructions to control the icreate with velocity commands from terminal:
1. From the terminal launch roscore. $roscore
2. Launch gazebo with an empty world. $roslaunch gazebo_ros empty_world.launch
3. In another terminal, spawn the create into the gazebo instance. Change directory to your create model. Then: $rosrun gazebo_ros spawn_model -file ~/catkin_ws/src/create/model-1_4.sdf -sdf -model create
4. Then send commands to make the robot move. $rostopic pub -r 10 /cmd_vel geometry_msgs/Twist ‘{linear: {x: 0.1, y: 0.0, z: 0.0}, angular: {x: 0.0,y: 0.0,z: 0.0}}’