[Rock-dev] Mars Simulating Sensors in Rock

[Jakob Schwendner]

Hi,

I am currently setting up a simulation of the spaceclimber, and wanted 
to integrate some sensors (dynamixel/hokyo) into the simulation and also 
output the data on rock ports. I've done this for asguard a while ago, 
but It was a very manual and sometimes painful process. It was certainly 
not very generic. What I did was derive a task from orogen/mars_core, 
that would have all the input and output ports of the sensors and 
control inputs for the simulation. In the task, which runs an instance 
of mars, I manually connected to the asguard plugin and performed the 
forwarding of data from simulation to the ports / vice versa. This 
means, I have to replicate the interface of all the sensors and 
integrate them into a single module. Also the connection has to be done 
everytime a new robot is integrated.

So here is an idea, that I had about improving the integration:
- deriving simulated sensor tasks directly from the driver tasks. E.g. 
SimulatedHokuyo, SimulatedDynamixel a.s.o
- Tasks would connect to a mars instance, receive/send sensor or command 
data, and forward it to the input/output ports of the task

In this way, the dataflow could also stay the same for a simulated/real 
environment.

My question are:
- Whats your opinion to this solution, compared to the more monolithic 
approach we had before?
- What is the best way to perform this connection to the mars process?

cheers,

Jakob

-- 
Jakob Schwendner, M.Sc.
Researcher

DFKI Bremen
Robotics Innovation Center
Robert-Hooke-Straße 5
28359 Bremen, Germany

Phone: +49 (0)421 17845-4120
Fax:   +49 (0)421 17845-4150
E-Mail: jakob.schwendner at dfki.de

Weitere Informationen: http://www.dfki.de/robotik
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