Mikhail and I are considering fielding an entry into Mech Warfare this season. To evaluate different geometries and servo models, I tried setting up a simple simulation environment which would let us experiment without having to have a large variety of hardware on hand. While we’re not finished, I have a minimal first proof of concept working now, which I’ll describe briefly.

Components

The simulator I’m using is Gazebo. It integrates several different rigid body physics engines, a 3D visualization environment, and a relatively simple file format for describing the configuration of robots. It uses a client server publish-subscribe model, where a central server maintains the physics simulation and any number of clients can connect to control or monitor individual models.

For gait generation, I’m starting with PyPose, which is a pose sequencer and inverse kinematics engine for the arbotiX controller, an open source Arduino compatible controller for Dynamixel servos. Specifically, the NUKE, or Nearly Universal Kinematics Engine, contains routines for generating a couple of different gait patterns for walking robots with lizard style legs.

Modifications

The nominal workflow I wanted was to operate PyPose on a synthetic robot, simulated by Gazebo. I had to add a couple of pieces of software to make that happen.

To start, Gazebo doesn’t really have a documented protocol for interacting with its publish subscribe network. The primary way clients use it currently is through ROS. To make this work, I wrote up a simple python client library which implements the publish subscribe protocol using eventlet. This allows python applications to both subscribe to topics, as well as publish them.

Next, PyPose is very specialized to the Dynamixel servos and the arbotiX controller. Additionaly, from a gait generation perspective, it is effectively composed of effectively two independent parts. The first is an ahead of time pose sequencer and configuration tool written in python. The second, is a generated Arduino sketch which implements the actual gait when run on an AVR controller. The former, I hacked in a simple abstraction layer and connected it to the python Gazebo library. For the latter, I actually ported the generated C code back into python in order to test the generated gaits in simulation.

Results

At the moment, I have only a rough proof of concept… the code is hacky, I haven’t yet simulated the physical characteristics of any particular servo, the physics model doesn’t seem quite right yet, and the Gazebo model consists of nothing but jointed rectangles with no textures. Despite that, in the video below, you can still see both PyPose manipulating the model, and the python gait generator operating it.

Next up, I’ll be trying to polish off the rough edges, and then try to evaluate the robot configuration variants I actually wanted to validate.