Gear Wheels based Simulation of Crawlers for Mobile Robot Servosila Engineer

In a process of research, it is beneficial to test new theories and early stage developments in virtual worlds of an adequate realistic simulation before starting real world experiments. While modelling of wheeled mobile robots is well-studied and typically does not imply significant difficulties, a realistic modelling of a crawler robot is a complicated task. This paper discusses several existing approaches for a crawler robot modelling in Gazebo simulator and presents a new approach, which approximates each crawler with a set of gear wheels. We compared several approaches for Servosila Engineer crawler robot modelling in Gazebo by their climbing capabilities, velocity, acceleration and real time factor parameters with regard to the real robot. The comparison results demonstrated that the new approach is feasible in terms of CPU load and provides a better approximation to the real robot performance. Moreover, it successfully eliminated an issue of a crawler seizure while climbing sharp edges of obstacles, which is typical for pseudo-wheels based approaches.