A collection of commonly used sensors: urdf files and a few tools

This package includes a variety of sensor models imported from different ROS packages available throughout the web. I picked the best / most suitable models and copied them to this package, so they are all available in one location. Several changes to the individual models were made, e.g. to share certain common properties, add new properties, gazebo tags, model refinements and adding extended models (e.g. a stand for the Xtion).

Includes:

• Kinect sensor based on turtlebot_description
• Kinect2 sensor based on PR2_common
• Xtion sensor based on robotnik sensors
• Hokuyo 04lx based on robotnik_sensors
• Hokuyo utm30lx based on hector_sensors_description
• from Uni Texas: copied the FootprintFilter and NanToInfFilter. Here is their LICENSE.

This package has the aim of grouping several simple sensor models such that they can be used in the other packages without the need to introduce a large set of ROS package dependencies just because of the URDF models of the sensors. Further, most of the urdf models have been improved, but are still based on the originals referenced in the list above.

• laser_filters
• openni_launch
• gazebo-plugins

Install mandatory dependencies

sudo apt-get install \
    ros-<distro>-laser-filters \
    ros-<distro>-openni-launch
    ros-<distro>-gazebo-plugins

Install common-sensors

Add the git repository to your catkin workspace:

cd <your-catkin-ws>/src
git clone https://github.com/JenniferBuehler/common-sensors.git

Hint: Alternatively to cloning the repositry directly into the catkin source folder, you may also clone the repositories elsewhere and then create a softlink to the main folders in your catkin source directory:
ln -s <path to common-sensors>

Compile

To compile, you can now use catkin_make as usual:

cd ..
catkin_make

Test a sample robot

There are some sample robots with just the sensor in it in the director urdf/sample_robots.

For example, for Kinect v2:

roslaunch gazebo_ros empty_world.launch
rosrun gazebo_ros spawn_model -file \
  `rospack find common_sensors`/urdf/sample_robots/kinectv2.urdf -urdf -model kinect2