Modelling a crawler-type UGV for urban search and rescue in Gazebo environment

A long-standing goal of robotics is to substitute humans in unreachable or dangerous environments, and one of such environments is urban search and rescue (USAR) domain. For USAR tasks we have selected a novel Russian crawlertype robot Engineer, and this paper presents our first steps toward modelling the robot in ROS/Gazebo environment. We convert provided by robot developers CAD models into workable ROS-based 3D simulation and incorporate physical parameters of the mechanisms into the model, focusing on track simulation. Robot motion and relative interplay of its visible mechanical parts is visualized in RViz software. The proposed model is integrated into a readyto-use ROS navigation stack and the model’s behavior is thoroughly investigated while navigating through static obstacles populated scene in Gazebo environment. In this paper, we introduce an approximation of track-surface interaction of Engineer robot with modeled environment, and discuss the applicability of ROS-based “Gazebo-tracks” package for robust robot locomotion.