@M1chaelM just a friendly ping

@acxz We are a bit occupied with other priorities at the moment, so I don't have a timeline for when we will get to review your feature requests. Eventually, I hope we'll have the chance to look through them and add them to a milestone if appropriate. If you need them in the near term, I'd recommend working from your fork.

I don't have a timeline for when we will get to review your feature requests

Sure, no worries

Would you still be okay with me opening more issues and PRs?

Would you still be okay with me opening more issues and PRs?

Yes, that's fine. If you have a lot of stuff though it might be good for us to get a sense of what you're working on and what your requirements are so we can plan for support. If we understand the high level objectives it will help us figure out how to prioritize.

If we understand the high level objectives it will help us figure out how to prioritize.

Sure. Essentially, I'm trying to solve #465 . I have a custom vehicle that I'd like to use in VRX. Previously I was using UUV, however, UUV does not have wave or wind simulation. As its name suggests its primary focus is for underwater vehicles (not the mention that it is essentially in archive mode, since the maintainers have not able to successfully been able to hand off leadership to a someone else). VRX is the only currently maintained simulation environment for USVs in Gazebo classic.

However, VRX itself is essentially hardcoded to work for two hull half cylinder type vehicles. The tugboat in #476, the custom vehicle in #434, and #465 all illustrate the community's need to generalize VRX to various USVs.

TLDR; add generic USV simulation to the Gazebo Classic ecosystem

my issues and PRs are a result of the questions/bugs I have encountered and my solutions to them along with feature implementations required for the above end goal.

However, VRX itself is essentially hardcoded to work for two hull half cylinder type vehicles. The tugboat in #476, the custom vehicle in #434, and #465 all illustrate the community's need to generalize VRX to various USVs.

TLDR; add generic USV simulation to the Gazebo Classic ecosystem

Thanks! This was very helpful. I agree it would be useful to make adding new vehicles easier. Do you need to use Gazebo Classic, or would Gazebo Sim work?

Can you point me to the custom vehicle that you want to use? I'd like to aggregate a few examples.

Do you need to use Gazebo Classic, or would Gazebo Sim work?

To be honest, I would like to use Gazebo Sim. However, currently Gazebo Sim does not have released plugins as high fidelity as Gazebo Classic for hydrodynamics work. One is in development by srmainwaring, which I am patiently waiting for. To be fair, VRX also has some fidelity that is lacking for my use cases, but I as well as others are also addressing this gap in several open PRs.

custom vehicle that you want to use

Clearpath's Heron: https://clearpathrobotics.com/heron-contact-us/
URDF files: https://github.com/heron/heron/tree/melodic-devel/heron_description

it would be useful to make adding new vehicles easier

Also just to clarify, adding new vehicles is currently not possible (if you want any resemblance of accurate dynamics). To make adding new vehicles easier would require documentation, which I am not working towards at this point, would be willing to add associated documentation to my subsequent PRs as needed.

@acxz , now that the main functionality has been ported to Gazebo and ROS 2 in main. Are you interested in retargeting your open PRs to main? We'll start reviewing them now that we have a stable codebase after the 2.0 release.

Thanks!

@acxz , friendly ping. What do you think about retargeting your PRs?

@caguero thanks for the ping, my project is still on ros-noetic and we haven't moved over to ROS 2 yet. Once we do or if I get some extra time I'll start redoing my PRs.