ros_gz_weekly.md

Task description

The Gazebo project is looking for a contributor that can review and improve the ROS <-> Gazebo Bridge Pull request for adding Spawn Entities, Delete Entities and set Pose for entities capabilities to the ROS bridge so using ROS these set of actions can be used in the Gazebo simulator. PR is gazebosim/ros_gz#380

Why is important:

The ros_gz bridge is the main mechanism of interchanging petitions and information between Gazebo and ROS. A very basic operations for Gazebo is the creation/removal of the simulation entities and the use of SetPose and a very common way of requesting from ROS is to use the services. This is impacting interesting projects like this Turtlebot 3 Deep Reinforcement Learning Navigation.

Requirements:

Very basic Gazebo knowledge and some familiarity with ROS core programming (mainly nodes and services). Basic ROS C++ programming

The plan for doing it:

• Create the development environment: the PR is targeting ros2 branch so according to the README we need to test it with ROS 2 Jazzy + Gazebo Harmonic and ROS 2 Rolling. + Gazebo Ionic. Both combinations can be installed on Linux by using in ROS: apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-ros-gz (using ROS Gz vendor packages). Official docker images for ROS rolling and ROS jazzy can be used https://hub.docker.com/_/ros.
• Pull request review: we expect in the PR review that the new features and the new code is exercise to see if it fits the expectations. Other code review usual approaches applied here: review the programming, the documentation added, etc. No problem if you are not an expert in programming, ROS or Gazebo, just indicate it in your review :)
• Multiple reviews from multiple users are welcome.
• Documentation: rclcpp ROS API might be useful. Gazebo transport API

What you will learn:

The PR allows the reviewer to be familiar with how Gazebo integrates with ROS using the bridge, know a bit about how the code base of the ros_gz is and play with simulation objects in the Gazebo simulator.

Communications

• For the result of the testing, please write a short summary of how did you test the code and which environment did you use directly in the PR please do it in the GitHub PR gazebosim/ros_gz#380. You can also use the usual GitHub review mechanisms (approvals, in-line comments, etc).
• For technical questions related to review, please do it in the GitHub PR gazebosim/ros_gz#380 .
• For other general questions, please use the #gazebo-general channel in the OSRF discord prefixing the message with [weekly-contributions] and a mention to @jrivero.