Gazebo model of quadcopter and world with multiple instances.
This project is a quadcopter model for Gazebo. It's an updated version of the example Gazebo quadcopter model, located in: /usr/share/gazebo-5.3/worlds/quad_rotor_demo.world
The use case for this model was multi-robot colaboration/swarms. So I wanted to have a world where I could ideally spawn multiple instances of a single model. However I was having difficulties getting this to work in Gazebo. So I took a different approach, where by I created a template model file with a placeholder model name. When I wanted multiple quads in a world, I used a simple Python script to copy the quad model template and update the model name place holder. Then in the Gazebo world file I could simply include the individual quad models. This worked pretty well.
Also I wanted the models I developed to be in my local workspace directory. I copied the standard Gazebo setup.sh script and added my model paths. So there is a boot2292.sh script that runs the custom setup script, then boots a world with three quads. From there I would run controller applications which interfaced with the Gazebo world and controlled the quads.
To run, update your paths in modelDev/gz_setup.sh, then source boot2292.sh. If you want to change the number of quads in the world, or want them to have differnet names, update genModels.py and rerun.
Thanks for your interest!
