MODELING OF THE MAIN STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE ROBOT VEHICLE «JUNIOR»

Abstract

It is well known that the use of simulators helps to reduce the cost and speed up the development of robotic systems, is a safer tool for the initial verification of ideas and algorithms, and will allow testing of new concepts and algorithms, regardless of the availability of the necessary equipment for the research team. Modeling can be used for all types of robotic systems and tasks in the initial stages of project development.

The robot vehicle was modeled in the ROS Gazebo environment. The approach to modeling was as follows: taking into account the physical characteristics of the robot vehicle, taking into account sensors and characteristics, using CAD models of the robot vehicle for modeling. When creating the model, the following programming environments were used: ROS, Gazebo. To make the model visually consistent with a real robot vehicle, parts for these elements and some sensors were used; the CAD model is publicly available. All the joints of the model were set in proportions that correspond to the proportions and dimensions of the real robot vehicle. To adapt the inertial characteristics of the robot vehicle to the model, a simplified inertial tensor for the joints was calculated.

In this work, we model the operation of a robot vehicle for moving products, namely, on the example of the AURORA Junior robot vehicle, the created model corresponds to the real size, its overall characteristics, and the presence of installed sensors. The need to develop basic software is due to the fact that the manufacturer provides a minimal set of ROS packages that only allow you to receive data from sensors and send commands to the robot's electric motors.