The gazebo simulator included in ROS is very powerful but also computionally demanding. To improve the performance on our systems we will use a lightweight setup for our tutorial.

In our manipulation-repo, create a new ROS package called iai_seminar_manipulation_environment. If you forgot how to create a pkg, peek here.

Remove the mainpage.dox as we won't use it. Instead you will document our packages on our wikipage. So, add a link to our wiki page in the manifest-file of the package.

Make a first local commit to our git-repo. In general, we recommend you to commit locally very often. A good rule of thumb is to have one commit per feature.

Also, please do not commit files that have been generated or built, i.e. anything from the directories bin or build or msg_gen etc, because these will be regenerated with every new compilation.

We will copy parts of the standard (but extensive) gazebo setup to start our empty world.

• In our environment package, create a sub-dir launch.
• In launch, create an empty launch-file called pr2_leightwight.launch (you can find the basic syntax of launch-files here)
• Go to the package pr2_gazebo using the roscd command line tool. If you have not yet installed pr2_gazebo on your computer, do so using aptitude.
• Open the file pr2_empty_world.launch from the sub-dir launch.
• Copy everything about starting up the empty world from this file to our launch-file in our environment package. Do not copy the part about starting up the PR2!
• Go back to our environment package, and add a dependency on the package gazebo_worlds to the manifest-file. We need to add this dependency because our launch-file depends on another launch-file from the gazebo_worlds package. Like this the buildsystem knows that it needs to compile gazebo_worlds (and all of its dependencies) when we compile our environment package.
• Compile our environment package using rosmake, and try launching our launch-file. Eventually, you should see an empty gazebo world.