These plugins enable the use of the Gazebo physics simulator to model robots, and then use WPILIB programming libraries to control those simulated robots.
At the present time, this only builds on Linux, and has a fairly complex installation process.
You must have the gazebo development packages available on Linux. The gradle build system will automatically skip building this directory if those requirements are not met.
This command:
`./gradlew build -PmakeSim`
will force it to attempt to build.
TODO: The meshes for the models are large, and are not hosted in the main allwpilib repository. An alternate method of hosting and using is being built at the time of this commit. You must manually locate and copy the the models and world from that either into /usr/share/frcgazebo or into build/share/frcgazebo in order to use this facility.
Once you have built it, then a command like this:
simulation/frc_gazebo_plugins/build/bin/frcgazebo PacGoat2014.world
should run the Gazebo simulation using our plugins against the 2014 model, with the PacGoat robot on the field.
The halsim_gazebo simulation library will provide a method for running robot code to control a simulated robot.
TODO: Package the plugins more nicely, and then put instructions here.
TODO: Build and package the plugins for Windows. The key there is to get gazebo working on Windows. This link was a useful trove of information on Windows/Gazebo issues as of September, 2017: https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issues/2129/visual-studio-2015-compatibility
Note that the sense remains that this will be difficult at best.