Simulation contains the packages where the dense maps are built

This page describes the isaac gazebo plugins.

Heat cam

This plugin simulates a heat-detecting camera, with the color in the images it produces suggestive of the temperature on the surface of the 3D environment seen in the camera.

The file

isaac/isaac/config/hw/heat_cam.config

controls the behavior of this camera. It is read only once, when the simulator is started. Its various parameters as follows:

heat_cam_rate: The update rate of the camera. It is suggested to keep it at 1.0 for nominal behavior, decrease it to make the camera images be updated less often, and to set it to 0.0 to have this sensor off.
continuous_picture_taking: If the camera should take pictures as often as it can. The alternative is for it to wait until it receives a command over the guest science topic when a single picture should be taken (see more below).
min_radiance and max_radiance: The radiance ("temperature") being measured is assumed to fall between these values. Any measurements outside of this range will be clamped to it. These values will be mapped to the "coolest" and "hottest" colors in the color image.
ambient_radiance: The radiance away from any hot or cold spots.

Each hot or cold spot will be assumed to be circular, and will be characterized by six numbers. They determine a spot's position in Cartesian coordinates, inner radius of the hot/cold spot, its outer radius, and its delta radiance.

Inside the inner radius region the radiance will be

ambient_radiance + delta_radiance

and it will gradually change to the ambient radiance by the time the boundary of the outer radius is reached.

This camera publishes the RGB heat image, its pose and intrinsics, on topics:

/hw/cam_heat /sim/heat_cam/pose /sim/heat_cam/info

To launch the simulator and see the heat map, first set up the environment. The paths below may need to be adjusted for your system.

export ASTROBEE_SOURCE_PATH=$HOME/astrobee/src export ASTROBEE_BUILD_PATH=$HOME/astrobee export ISAAC_WS=$HOME/isaac source $ASTROBEE_BUILD_PATH/devel/setup.bash source $ISAAC_WS/devel/setup.bash

Then run:

roslaunch isaac sim.launch world:=iss rviz:=true \ pose:="11.2 -7.72 5.0 0 0 0 0 1"

Note that as the robot moves and leaves the hot spots behind, the heat cam will only show the constant ambient temperature.

By default, the camera takes pictures as often as it can. It listens however to the topic

/comm/dds/command

for guest science commands that may tell it to take a single picture at a specific time, or to take pictures continuously. Such a command must use the app name "gov.nasa.arc.irg.astrobee.heat_cam_image" (which is the "s" field in the first command argument) for it to be processed.

Acoustics camera