News

Underwater Visual Servoing simulation with UWSim

This video shows a visual servoing application where an I-AUV has to first align with an object before starting a manipulation action. Green crosses represent the perceived corners of the observed object, whereas red crosses show the desired pose. A 2D Visual Servoing control law (using ViSP) is executed in order to minimize the error between the current and the desired projection of the object in the image. The UWSim simulator is used to visualize the execution, and to provide images from a virtual camera, everything running into a ROS middleware.

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Support for PCD point clouds

UWSim now supports the load of point clouds generated with the PCL library (PCD format). The initial version only supports XYZRGB data types. Although it should also load point clouds with other types, only position and color will displayed. The class name is osgPCDLoader and can be used in the following way:

osgPCDLoader pcdLoad("pointCloudFile.pcd");
root->addChild(pcdLoad.geode);

Basically, the osgPCDLoader class reads the PCD file using the PCL library and builds an OpenSceneGraph drawable object enclosed in a Geode, that can be directy attached to your scene graph. The point cloud is rendered as colored points, with lighting disabled.

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First tests of Bullet physics on UWSim

We are happy to show the first experiments of Bullet physics running on UWSim. The following video shows a first experiment of Bullet physics integration into our underwater simulator. The scenario consists of a water tank with a printed poster on the bottom, an I-AUV and a black box. The I-AUV manipulator is controlled with a joystick through ROS, so that contacts with the black box are established. As expected, the black box position is updated according to the contacts and forces that are applied. This is the first step towards simulating intervention missions requiring physical interaction with the environment, such as grasping, manipulating valves, etc.

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