Simulating GPS in Gazebo

In this section, we will see how to simulate a GPS sensor in Gazebo. As you know, GPS is one of the essential sensors in a self-driving car. You can start a GPS simulation using the following command:

$ roslaunch sensor_sim_gazebo gps.launch

Now, you can list out the topic and find the GPS topics published from the Gazebo plugin. Here is a list of topics from the GPS plugin:

Figure 20: List of topics from the Gazebo GPS plugin

You can echo the /gps/fix topic to confirm that the plugin is publishing the values correctly.

You can use the following command to echo this topic:

$ rostopic echo /gps/fix

Figure 21: Values published to the /gps/fix topic

If you look at the code in sensor_sim_gazebo/urdf/gps.xacro, you will find <plugin name="gazebo_ros_gps" filename="libhector_gazebo_ros_gps.so">; these plugins belong to the hector_gazebo_ros_plugins package, which we installed at the beginning of the sensor interfacing. We can set all parameters...