Downloading and Installing gazebo-yarp-plugins

Dependencies

For using YARP with Gazebo, you shall install:

Gazebo simulator and its header files (at least version 7), following the instructions on the official Gazebo website. If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, remember to install the header files for Gazebo, that are contained in the libgazebo*-dev package.
YARP following the instructions on the YARP documentation.

Gazebo is under active development, so it is recommended to use the latest released version of Gazebo.

You could prefer to run an older version of Gazebo if you want to use it with ROS integration. Depending on your ROS version you have to stick to a given Gazebo version. YARP integration provided by gazebo-yarp-plugins is not affected by this kind of limitations.

Compilation

You get the gazebo-yarp-plugins source code from this git repository repository (if you do not have git on your computer, follow this guide to install it)

git clone https://github.com/robotology/gazebo-yarp-plugins.git

This will create a gazebo-yarp-plugins directory with all the source code. You can enter this directory:

cd gazebo-yarp-plugins

You can then create a build directory inside it to hold all the compiled files:

mkdir build

You can use CMake to generate the necessary file for the compilation, and compile gazebo-yarp-plugins using make. The plugins should be install in the directory specified by CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX (by default /usr/local):

cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release" ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/the/install/folder
cmake --config Release --build . --target install

To notify Gazebo of the new plugins compiled, it is necessary to modify the GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable:

export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=${GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH}:/path/to/the/install/folder/lib

where /path/to/the/install/folder/lib is the directory containing the libgazebo_yarp_controlboard.so, libgazebo_yarp_forcetorque.so... files.

To avoid having to modify this environment variable each time, you can place this command in the .bashrc file in your home directory.

Usage

To use the gazebo-yarp-plugins you can try to use a YARP-enabled Gazebo model of a robot. You can use a robot model already equipped for simulating its YARP-interfaces, such as:

The iCub models, available at https://github.com/robotology/icub-models .
The Coman model, available at https://github.com/ADVRHumanoids/iit-coman-ros-pkg .
The Vizzy model, available at https://github.com/vislab-tecnico-lisboa/vizzy .

To embed the plugins contained in gazebo-yarp-plugins in a new Gazebo model, check Use the gazebo-yarp-plugins in Gazebo Models .