EasyNav TIAGo Playground: worlds

Gazebo simulation (Harmonic or newer) of PAL Robotics’ TIAGo in the AWS RoboMaker small house: the world and its models, the maps of the house, and the launchers that start Gazebo and spawn TIAGo (robot state publisher, ros2_control controllers and ROS–Gazebo bridge). It does not depend on EasyNav: easynav_playground_tiago 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_tiago_worlds
source install/setup.bash

Simulation

To run Gazebo and TIAGo without EasyNav or RViz2:

ros2 launch easynav_playground_tiago_worlds gazebo_sim.launch.yaml

tiago.launch.yaml spawns TIAGo in a running simulation (x, y, z, Y set the pose). The arm starts tucked, in PAL’s home posture.

Topics

Gazebo publishes every message of the RGBD camera with the same frame, head_front_camera_rgb_frame (x forward), which is right for the point cloud. To project images with camera_info, use the optical frame head_front_camera_rgb_optical_frame.

Moving the robot

The base listens on /mobile_base_controller/cmd_vel (geometry_msgs/TwistStamped), for instance with the keyboard:

ros2 run teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard --ros-args -p stamped:=true -r cmd_vel:=/mobile_base_controller/cmd_vel

Without commands, the base controller warns once a second that it is braking (“Velocity command timed out”); this is expected.

The torso, head, arm and gripper have joint_trajectory_controllers: torso_controller, head_controller, arm_controller and gripper_controller. Each takes FollowJointTrajectory goals on <controller>/follow_joint_trajectory, or a trajectory on <controller>/joint_trajectory. For example, to look down:

ros2 topic pub --once /head_controller/joint_trajectory trajectory_msgs/msg/JointTrajectory \
  "{joint_names: [head_1_joint, head_2_joint], points: [{positions: [0.0, -0.6], time_from_start: {sec: 1}}]}"

Maps

The costmap (maps/home2.yaml, 5 cm) is the house map shared with easynav_playground_kobuki. The other two maps were generated with NavMap’s navmap_tools:

1. home2_20cm.navmap, the flat NavMap: the costmap resampled to 20 cm cells, which keeps the NavMap filters and the AMCL within their cycles.

   ros2 run navmap_tools navmap_resample maps/home2.yaml maps/home2_20cm.navmap 0.2
   

1. house.pcd, the Bonxai 3D map: navmap_map_builder teleports TIAGo through the free space of the house and puts together the head camera’s and the laser’s clouds at the ground-truth poses, turning to 8 headings at each position (the camera’s field of view is narrow). With the simulation up and TIAGo looking down, so that the camera sees the floor and the low obstacles near the robot:

   ros2 launch easynav_playground_tiago_worlds gazebo_sim.launch.yaml gui:=false
   ros2 topic pub --once /head_controller/joint_trajectory trajectory_msgs/msg/JointTrajectory \
     "{joint_names: [head_1_joint, head_2_joint], points: [{positions: [0.0, -0.6], time_from_start: {sec: 1}}]}"
   ros2 run navmap_tools navmap_map_builder /tmp/house --world default --model tiago \
     --cloud-topic /head_front_camera/depth_registered/points /scan_raw/points \
     --headings 8 --clearance 0.6 --robot-cut 0.6 --spawn-z 0.05
   

Then copy /tmp/house.pcd to maps/.

Package layout

Authors and licensing

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file

Changelog for package easynav_playground_tiago_worlds

0.5.0 (2026-10-08)

• First release, in the easynav_playgrounds repository: Gazebo (Harmonic or newer) simulation of the PAL Robotics' TIAGo in the AWS RoboMaker small house, with their maps and the launchers that spawn the robot, without EasyNav dependencies
• Contributors: Francisco Martín Rico, Juan Sebastián Cely Gutierrez