pyrobolearn/examples/simulators

Simulator examples

In this folder, you will have simple examples on how to use different simulators by loading a simple world (with a floor and gravity enabled), and a simple robot.

The various files can be called by python <simulator>.py. Note that they are mostly identical, and only the line

sim = Simulator(args)  # Bullet, BulletROS, ROS, etc

need to be changed. The basic idea is that your code should work without depending on which simulator you use. Note that currently, the Bullet simulator is the only fully functional API, while the others are partially implemented or still need to be implemented.

Here are the few examples that you can find in this folder:

1. bullet.py: simple example where we use the Bullet simulator, load a basic world (with a floor and gravity enabled) and the RRBot robot in it.
2. bullet_ros_publisher.py: example where we use the BulletROS(publish=True) simulator which publishes the joint position values that were returned by the Bullet simulator on the corresponding ROS topic.
3. bullet_ros_subscriber.py: example where we use the BulletROS(subscribe=True) simulator which gets the joint values from the ROS topics and change them in the simulator. This works with the bullet_ros_publisher.py code presented above. By moving the robot with your mouse in the publisher version, you will see the robot in this subscriber version moves in accordance with. This can be useful if you have access to the real platform as well.
4. simulators.py: example which loads few primitive shapes and the ANYmal robot using a simulator among Bullet, Mujoco, Raisim, and Dart. Only the line sim = <SimulatorName>(render=True) needs to be changed. Note that the integration of these other simulators is ongoing.

Later, a ROS/ROS_RBDL "simulator" (without passing by a real simulator like Bullet) will allow you to make your code works on a real platform using ROS without changing any other lines of code. This is one of the big TODOs but is not currently my priority.