Genesis ROS Bridge (gs_ros) 🤖

gs_ros is a ROS 2 package designed to bridge the gap between the powerful Genesis simulator and the ROS 2 ecosystem. Genesis is a next-gen physics platform for Robotics and Embodied AI, offering:

1. A universal physics engine built from the ground up for a wide range of materials.
2. A lightweight, ultra-fast, and user-friendly robotics simulation platform.
3. A powerful and fast photo-realistic rendering system.
4. A generative data engine that can create multi-modal data from natural language prompts.

This project provides the essential tools to kickstart your robotics development and simulation within ROS 2 using Genesis. Using this package is very simple, the main code is 5 lines long

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✨ Key Features

gs_ros is a lightweight, pure Python package that simplifies the integration of Genesis and ROS 2.

• ROS 2 Control Integration: uses a topic based hardware interface for seamless compatibility with the ros2_control framework.
• Simulator Services: Exposes core simulator functionalities (like pausing, resetting, domain_randomisation,inverse kinematics, forward kinematics, path planning) through ROS 2 services, defined in the accompanying gs_ros_interfaces package.
• Comprehensive Sensor Suite: Provides a variety of simulated sensors, publishing data on standard ROS 2 topics.

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🎮 Supported Sensors

gs_ros provides out-of-the-box support for several common robotics sensors:

• 📷 Camera: Publishes RGB, depth, semantic segmentation, and surface normal images.
• 📸 RGBD Camera: A convenient wrapper for synchronized RGB and point cloud publishing.
• 🛰️ IMU: Simulates an Inertial Measurement Unit.
• 📏 Sectional Lidar: A ray based lidar covering a section of the space(analogus to a depth camera).
• 🌐 3D Lidar: A ray based 360 degree 3D Lidar.
• 📡 LaserScan A 360 degree laser-scan with one vertical channel, commonly used in robotics
• 💥 Contact Force Sensor A tactile sensor to measure the force experinced by a speified link
• 💥 contact senor A binary tactile sensor to check if an entity is in contact with any other entity

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⚙️ Installation

Prerequisites

1. ROS 2: This package is developed for ROS 2. Ensure you have a working installation (e.g., jazzy, kilted, rolling, humble).
2. Genesis Simulator: Install Genesis by following the instructions in the official Genesis repository.

   Note: gs_ros was tested with Genesis v0.3.5. Newer versions may have compatibility issues. Please report any problems you encounter!

Steps

1. Downgrade NumPy(optional) The default NumPy version installed with Genesis may not be compatible with ROS 2. Downgrade to a compatible version:

   pip install numpy==1.26.4

2. Clone the Repository Navigate to your Colcon workspace's src directory and clone this repository.

   # Example for a workspace in ~/ros2_ws
   cd ~/ros2_ws/src
   git clone https://github.com/vybhav-ibr/genesis_ros.git .

   Use the 'humble' barnch for that distro, for every-other distro use the main branch

3. Install Dependencies Let rosdep handle the required dependencies.

   cd ~/ros2_ws
   rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

4. Build and Source the Workspace Build the package using colcon.

   cd ~/ros2_ws
   colcon build

   Troubleshooting: If you encounter an ImportError: No module named 'em', it might be due to a conflict with a Python virtual environment. Deactivate any active virtual environment run the colcon clean workspace command and try building with the --merge-install flag: colcon build --merge-install

   After a successful build, source your workspace's setup file:

   source install/setup.bash

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🧪 Example Usage

1. Start the genesis Simulator and the gs_ros bridge

   python test_import.py

2. Launch the Ackermann Drive Demo Run the provided demo from the gs_ros2_control_demos package to see a wheeled robot in action.

   ros2 launch gs_ros2_control_demos ackermann_drive_example.launch.py

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📝 Known Issues & Limitations

• Genesis Version: Genesis is under active development. Using the latest version from their main branch may cause issues. Sticking to a tagged release like v0.3.5 is recommended. but any version after v0.3.5 should be mostly compatable
• Parallel Environments: Support for parallelized simulation environments is not yet implemented but may be added in the future.
• Sensor Models: Currently, no advanced sensor noise or distortion models are included. This is planned for a future release.
• topic_based_hardware_interfaces: This external package is used gs_ros for integrating ros2_control with a topic based system topic_based_hardware_interfaces.For the humble branch topic_based_ros2_control by picknik robotics is used as humble distro is not supported. The update frequncy for the topic-based-hardware-interface may be a limitation, This package is also not suitable for real-time controllers

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🤝 Contributing & Support

• Contributions Welcome! Feel free to open a Pull Request to fix a bug or add a feature. If you'd like to contribute long-term, please open an issue to discuss it.
• Need Help? For bugs, feature requests, or suggestions, please open an issue in the repository.
• Configuration Docs: For details on the parameters in the config files, please refer to the Genesis source code, as the official documentation may not be up-to-date.