Hi everyone,
I am hoping to set up basic obstacle detection and avoidance with my drone, and I would like to test my code on the simulator. I would be using sonar rangefinders and see from the rangefinders tutorial that we can easily add this to a drone model or just use something like the typhoon that already has this.
I am able to successfully run the simulation and see the blue projection of the simulated sonar. However, I am not able to see any data published on ROS via mavros. On line 37 of the sonar’s sdf file (src/Firmware/Tools/sitl_gazebo/models/sonar/model.sdf), I can see that the published topic name should be “range_down”. This does not show up under the listed topics being published when running the mavros connection to the simulation.
I also continuously receive this message on the terminal tab of the running simulation:
[Wrn] [msgs.cc:1655] Conversion of sensor type[sonar] not suppported.
I read on the bottom of this forum post that the distance data would only be available through mavlink, but not ROS. Is this true?
I would greatly appreciate if anyone could help me solve this issue. I feel that debugging my code on the simulator is definitely the right strategy for developing an autonomous robot, but all these roadblocks make me feel the costs outweigh the benefits.
Thank you!