No Sensor Data / Visualization

[David Lu!!]

I'm trying to run the simulator (using Ubuntu 14.04 / Indigo). However, the GUI does not display the robot.

roslaunch ihmc_atlas ihmc_atlas_scs_demo01.launch

More importantly, the simulation does not publish any sensor data (nothing published on image topics or lidar_scan).

I believe this may because I don't have the proper video card installed, but I'm unsure how to proceed in debugging.

[DouglasS]

Hey @davidlu, thanks for the bug report.

We don't really restrict graphics cards under Linux, though we do highly recommend Nvidia for graphics. However, the 3D library we use for our simulator does have a lot of problems with the open-source drivers available for most graphics cards. We highly recommend that you install the vendor-provided (and unfortunately closed source) drivers for whatever card you have installed in your computer.

The lack of sensor data being published is almost definitely a result of the simulation crashing silently due to problems with the graphics.

There should be an "ihmc_err" topic that gets published, can you see if the code is even getting far enough to start that topic and if so, does it contain any useful information?

[David Lu!!]

Thanks for the quick response.

Nothing is published on the /ihmc_ros/atlas/ihmc_err topic, though it is advertised. The following is the regular launch output.

#!
core service [/rosout] found
process[robot_state_publisher-1]: started with pid [19716]
process[IHMCAtlasAPISimulatorDemo01-2]: started with pid [19746]
[INFO] (AtlasJointMap.java:51): Running with torque and velocity limits disabled.
[INFO] (NetworkParameters.java:34): Loading network parameters from /home/dlu/Catkin/nasa_2015/src/ihmc_ros/ihmc_atlas/configurations/IHMCNetworkParametersSim.ini
[WARN] (DRCSimulationFactory.java:255): Initializing Estimator to Actual!
[INFO] (DRCNetworkProcessor.java:272): Connecting to controller using intra process communication
[INFO] (OffscreenBufferVideoServer.java:40): Starting video stream
[INFO] (JMERenderer.java:619): GPULidar scene updated. Took 2.9E-4 s
[INFO] (RosTfPublisher.java:24): tfPrefix option set to NONE - using no prefix
IHMC ROS API node successfully started.

For purposes of Googling, what is the 3D library?

[DouglasS]

@davidlu We use jMonkeyEngine, which uses LWJGL under the hood.

[DouglasS]

@davidlu To add on to this, you won't be able to get simulated sensors until the 3D visualization works as we use the 3D library to generate a lot of the simulated data. For example, our simulated lidar works by pulling data directly from the OpenGL depth buffer. So they are definitely related issues.

[Stefan Kohlbrecher]

To add a data point, this is what just also happened on my laptop when I forgot the "optirun" prefix before invocation of the simulator (resulting in the Intel instead of Nvidia card getting used). With Nvidia, everything works fine.