Application: GridmapNavSimul

GridmapNavSimul is a GUI program that takes an occupancy gridmap and let you move a robot around simulating a laser scanner. The robot can be teleoperated manually with the keyboard, with a joystick or reproduce a sequence of fixed poses given in a file.

Launch it with:

GridmapNavSimul

The following video tutorial summarizes its usage:

User interface

The simulated world is the background of the window; the camera follows the robot (this can be disabled in the “View” menu). Drive the robot with the arrow keys while the mouse is over the 3D view (Space brakes), or with a joystick. Dockable panels:

• Simulation: START / STOP recording, the output rawlog and ground truth files, the rawlog format (actions/sensory-frames, or observations only), decimation, joystick, and Re-simulate a rawlog, which regenerates the laser scans of a recorded rawlog with the current sensor parameters.

• Sensor: number of ranges, span, and range and bearing noise of the simulated laser scanner.

• Odometry error model: bias and standard deviation of the odometry errors in x, y and heading, as fractions of each motion increment.

While recording, the rawlog, a ground truth text file (time x y phi per line, relative to the starting pose) and the gridmap (<rawlog>_grid.gridmap.gz) are saved. The “File” menu loads another gridmap: a binary .gridmap(.gz) file, or an image (its resolution and center are asked for).