EasyNav Summit Playground: worlds

Gazebo Harmonic simulation of a Robotnik Summit XL in three worlds, the URJC excavation (an outdoor 3D terrain), a small indoor warehouse and a parking garage with three floors linked by ramps: the worlds and their models, their maps, and the launchers that start Gazebo and spawn the Summit XL (robot state publisher, ros2_control controllers and ROS–Gazebo bridge). It does not depend on EasyNav: easynav_playground_summit adds the navigation.

Supported ROS 2 distributions

This playground needs Gazebo Harmonic or newer, so it runs on Jazzy and later distributions, but not on Humble, whose Gazebo is Fortress. EasyNav itself (core and plugins) does run on Humble: only this simulation does not.

Build

From the ROS 2 workspace root:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
colcon build --symlink-install --packages-up-to easynav_playground_summit_worlds
source install/setup.bash

Simulation

To run Gazebo and the Summit XL without EasyNav or RViz2:

ros2 launch easynav_playground_summit_worlds gazebo_sim.launch.yaml

To spawn the robot in a running simulation, use summit.launch.yaml with a spawn pose (x, y, z).

The simulated Summit XL publishes:

It also publishes TF, and listens on /cmd_vel (geometry_msgs/Twist). twist_stamper forwards it to the diff drive controller, which takes TwistStamped on /robotnik_base_control/cmd_vel.

The excavation’s stitched tiles

The excavation’s terrain is a set of photogrammetry tiles (about 30 x 38 m) that share no vertices: each one ends in a vertical skirt under the ground, and the rims of neighbouring tiles were at slightly different heights. Each seam was a step, up to 0.5 m, that could stop the Summit XL. Both meshes (models/urjc_excavation/meshes/URJC_excavation.stl, the collision mesh, and URJC_excavation.dae, the visual one) have their tiles stitched by tools/stitch_rims.py, run twice: the rim vertices of different tiles closer than 0.35 m meet halfway, in height and across, when they differ by less than 0.5 m. Nothing else moves. Seam steps over 0.15 m went from 487 to 225 (0.1 m cells of the top surface); the one at (-33.7, 11.7), which stopped the robot, is gone.

Building the excavation maps

maps/excavation_urjc_world.pcd samples the world’s collision mesh (models/urjc_excavation/meshes/URJC_excavation.stl) uniformly, 20 points/m², in the map frame: the mesh is raised 5.77 m so that z = 0 is the terrain under the spawn point. maps/excavation_urjc.navmap meshes that cloud with navmap_ros::from_points at 1 m, dropping surfaces smaller than 4 m². Against the collision mesh its height error is 1 cm (median), 6 cm (p90). maps/excavation_urjc.pcd, the cloud the Bonxai map is built from, is unchanged.

Building the parking garage maps

The parking garage maps come from simulated 3D lidar scans of the world’s collision mesh (models/parking_garage/meshes/parking_garage.dae), so faces hidden inside the model (the floor under the ramps) never enter them.

• The scans: a VLP-16-like sensor 0.8 m above the ground, every 2 m on floors 0–2 (the roof is not reachable), 2 cm range noise.
• maps/parking_garage.pcd: keeps one point per 0.1 m voxel (the points’ centroid), in the map frame with z = 0 on the ground floor under the spawn point (the mesh is lowered 0.078 m).
• maps/parking_garage.navmap: meshes that cloud with navmap_ros::from_points at 0.4 m. Floors 0–2 are one surface that overlaps itself and connects through the ramps.
• maps/parking_garage_bonxai.pcd: keeps one point per occupied 0.3 m voxel.

Building the warehouse maps

The warehouse maps were generated from the simulation with two tools of NavMap’s navmap_tools:

1. navmap_map_builder builds the 3D cloud (warehouse.pcd, for Bonxai). It teleports the robot through the free space (gz service .../set_pose) and puts its lidar scans together at the ground-truth poses: a new position is taken when ground was seen around it and no obstacle is within --clearance.
2. navmap_map2d_from_pcd builds the 2D occupancy grid (warehouse.pgm/.yaml, for the flat NavMap) from that cloud: points between 0.1 and 1.2 m high are obstacles, free space is flood-filled from a seed inside the walls, and the rest is unknown.

To regenerate them (or build maps of another world), start the simulation without EasyNav and run the tools:

ros2 launch easynav_playground_summit_worlds gazebo_sim.launch.yaml gui:=false \
  world:=$(ros2 pkg prefix easynav_playground_summit)/share/easynav_playground_summit/worlds/small_warehouse.world
ros2 run navmap_tools navmap_map_builder /tmp/warehouse --world warehouse --model summit_xl \
  --cloud-topic /front_laser/points --ground-truth-topic /ground_truth
ros2 run navmap_tools navmap_map2d_from_pcd /tmp/warehouse.pcd /tmp/warehouse

Then copy warehouse.pcd, warehouse.pgm and warehouse.yaml to maps/. Run each tool with --help for its options (seed, resolution, height band, topics, headings).

Package layout

Authors and licensing

The launchers, bridge configuration and maps were developed by Francisco Martín Rico at the Intelligent Robotics Lab (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), under Apache-2.0; see LICENSE. It includes third-party worlds under their own licenses:

• The URJC excavation world (worlds/urjc_excavation.world, models/urjc_excavation/), by Juan Sebastián Cely Gutierrez, comes from urjc-excavation-world (main branch). Its license file is GPL-3.0; see models/urjc_excavation/LICENSE. Its meshes are modified here: their tiles are stitched (see above).
• The small warehouse world (worlds/small_warehouse.world, models/aws_robomaker_warehouse_*) comes from aws-robomaker-small-warehouse-world (ros1 branch), under the MIT-0 license; see models/LICENSE-aws-robomaker. Changes for Gazebo Sim: the roof was removed (the lidar and the GUI camera see inside), the Gazebo Sim system plugins, spherical coordinates and a sun were added, the physics step is 5 ms, and the floor model’s (GroundB) invalid inertia was fixed.
• The warehouse maps (maps/warehouse.*) were generated from that world with navmap_tools.
• The parking garage world (worlds/parking_garage*.world, worlds/parking_garage.sdf, models/parking_garage/, models/parking_garage_ground_plane/ and the models/*_cube/ models), by Juan Sebastián Cely Gutierrez, comes from parking-garage-world. Its license file is GPL-3.0; see models/parking_garage/LICENSE. The garage model is based on a model by michaelwjl on free3d.com.

Changelog for package easynav_playground_summit_worlds

0.5.1 (2026-10-21)

• Parking garage world
• Excavation: NavMap from the collision mesh, and terrain tiles stitched without steps
• NavMaps moved to file format version 2
• Worlds credited to Juan Sebastián Cely Gutierrez
• Enable cpplint and copyright linters
• Contributors: Francisco Martín Rico

0.5.0 (2026-10-08)

• First release, in the easynav_playgrounds repository: Gazebo (Harmonic or newer) simulation of the Robotnik Summit XL in the URJC excavation and a small warehouse, with their maps and the launchers that spawn the robot, without EasyNav dependencies
• Contributors: Francisco Martín Rico, Juan Sebastián Cely Gutierrez