Ackermann Steered Vehicle Controlled by ROS

Question

Hey!

I am very new to Gazebo and I am try to make / find a package that will allow me to simulate an ackermann steered vehicle in gazebo and control it through ROS. I was hoping for something along the lines of the database polaris ranger EV.

There are a variety of existing packages out there but most seem unfinished or outdated (don't work with ROS kinetic, etc.).

The best I could find is the ackermann_vehicle package but it uses a small RC car as the model which isn't exactly what I was looking for and apparently has problems scaling it up to a larger vehicle due to assumptions of size in the code.

Does anybody know of a good package I could use that would do this or a way to edit an existing package to change it to control the polaris ranger ev?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

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Originally posted by H_Gottlieb on Gazebo Answers with karma: 1 on 2017-01-15

Post score: 0

Answer 1

So my final solution was to keep using the ackermann_vehicle package. If you tune the PID in the .yaml files then it seems to work fine for a larger vehicle. There is still a problem with heavy weight (so the vehicle can be large in size, intertia and everything else but not in weight) but that seems to be more widespread within Gazebo.

If anybody has a fix for the drifting associated with the heavy weight that would be beyond awesome!

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Originally posted by H_Gottlieb with karma: 1 on 2017-02-25

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by zephirefaith on 2017-06-28:
HI @H_gottlieb, I am trying to do a similar thing. I need to collect some driving data by making users drive a car using a Logitech steering wheel. I think I have a reasonable transformation between the steering msgs and the vehicle, but to make things more realistic I need a car frame instead of the small RC car. Dyu maybe have a github or can share some code on this?