ROS-PyBullet Interface: A Framework for Reliable Contact Simulation and Human-Robot Interaction
This addresses a software integration problem for robotics researchers and developers, enabling more seamless application of novel approaches to existing hardware, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tools.
The paper tackles the lack of software connecting reliable contact simulation with the robotics ecosystem by presenting the ROS-PyBullet Interface, a framework that bridges PyBullet and ROS, and includes utilities for human-robot interaction in simulation.
Reliable contact simulation plays a key role in the development of (semi-)autonomous robots, especially when dealing with contact-rich manipulation scenarios, an active robotics research topic. Besides simulation, components such as sensing, perception, data collection, robot hardware control, human interfaces, etc. are all key enablers towards applying machine learning algorithms or model-based approaches in real world systems. However, there is a lack of software connecting reliable contact simulation with the larger robotics ecosystem (i.e. ROS, Orocos), for a more seamless application of novel approaches, found in the literature, to existing robotic hardware. In this paper, we present the ROS-PyBullet Interface, a framework that provides a bridge between the reliable contact/impact simulator PyBullet and the Robot Operating System (ROS). Furthermore, we provide additional utilities for facilitating Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in the simulated environment. We also present several use-cases that highlight the capabilities and usefulness of our framework. Please check our video, source code, and examples included in the supplementary material. Our full code base is open source and can be found at https://github.com/cmower/ros_pybullet_interface.