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optitrack-gazebo

optitrack-gazebo is a gazebo plugin that emulates an OptiTrack Motion Capture system. It streams live a configurable subset of links pose as computed by the gazebo simulator. The streaming protocol is compatible with the NatNet 2.9 format of OptiTrack.

Installation

After configuring, compiling and installing the software in the $PREFIX folder, the plugin can be found in the $PREFIX/lib/gazebo/optitrack-gazebo.so. To load it from gazebo, an option is to configure the environment variable GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH so that it contains this directory. For instance:

% export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=$PREFIX/lib/gazebo:${GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH}

optitrack-gazebo is a World plugin. A sample SDF file to use it would look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<sdf version="1.4">
  <world name="default">
    <plugin name="optitrack" filename="optitrack-gazebo.so">
      <!-- configuration options goes here -->
    </plugin>
  </world>
</sdf>

Configuration

The list of links to be published is defined by the publish SDF element in the plugin configuration section. Each publish element must contain a sub-element link with the name of the link to publish.

An optional offset element, containing a 6-tuple, may define a x, y, z, roll, pitch, yaw offset to the published position, in the link frame.

Links are published with their full scoped names. An optional <name> element can be used to assign a different or shorter name to the published data.

<plugin name="optitrack" filename="optitrack-gazebo.so">
  <publish>
    <link>ground_plane::link</link> <!-- 0 offset and full name -->
  </publish>
  <publish>
    <link>box::link</link>
    <name>box</name> <!-- shorter name -->
    <offset>0 0 0.5 0 0 0</offset>  <!-- offset by 0.5m on Z -->
  </publish>
</plugin>

Artificial noise

Without option, the streamed poses are exact and associated with a mean average error of 10-4m (0.1mm). Random Gaussian noise can be added with the <noise> tag containing the desired noise standard deviation:

<plugin name="optitrack" filename="optitrack-gazebo.so">
  <noise>0.03</noise>
</plugin>

Streaming frequency

The streaming frequency defaults to 100Hz. Specify a different frequency with the <hz> tag:

<plugin name="optitrack" filename="optitrack-gazebo.so">
  <hz>50</hz>
</plugin>

Network options

Data is streamed on UDP unicast, port 1509 by default. The port can be changed with the <port> tag:

<plugin name="optitrack" filename="optitrack-gazebo.so">
  <port>1510</port>
</plugin>