Football Table Simulation Visualization Tool

Author: Rein Appeldoorn

Gazebo

A simulator is developed to easily test new algorithms without depending on the actual robot. In has been developed using gazebo (w/o the use of ROS), a so-called physics abstraction layer, which employs ODE combined with OGRE for rendering. The environment/robots are described in the SDF format, which in this case is combined with Collada (*.dae) renderings for more complex geometry. A previous attempt was created using MORSE, however this did not allow good tuning of the physics.

Inter-process Communication

This simulation communicates with Matlab Simulink using Interprocess Communication (IPC) wrapper library for the POSIX libraries. This library uses mutexes and condition variables enabling a thread-safe, synchronized, causal communication between two processes e.g. Gazebo and Simulink. This allows us to use the Gazebo simulator as a plant in our simulink control loop. More on this library and how it is used, can be found here *EDIT*.