Gazebo 2023 Google Summer of Code
We’re really excited to announce our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students for 2023. This year we are mentoring two GSoC students who are helping us with the development of new features for Gazebo that will hopefully make it into the Gazebo Harmonic release later this year. We asked the students to share a little bit about themselves and what they plan to work on over the summer.
Henrique Barros Oliveira
Henrique will be helping the Gazebo team build new GUI interfaces that allow users to apply forces and torques to objects in a Gazebo simulation.
Henrique Barros Oliveira
Henrique is a fifth-year Mechatronics Engineering student from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, currently enrolled in a double degree exchange program with CentraleSupélec, in France. He is passionate about robotics, computer science and control systems. Previously, he worked with autonomous drones at the student team Skyrats, where he was involved with ROS and Gazebo and developed a desire to contribute to open source. In his free time, he enjoys playing piano and tenor saxophone, and likes fantasy fiction literature.
For his project, Henrique will develop tools that allow Gazebo users to apply forces and torques to objects directly through the GUI. First, he will develop a GUI plugin that allows the user to apply precise forces and torques by specifying their values through an interface. Once that’s working, he will implement a plugin that allows the user to exert forces and torques by dragging objects around in the scene with the mouse cursor. This will allow users to conveniently introduce perturbations to models and to move them while interacting with the dynamics of other objects in the simulation.
Jasmeet Singh
This summer Jasmeet will be working with the Gazebo team to automatically compute moments of inertia for Gazebo entities using their SDFormat links.
Jasmeet Singh
Jasmeet is a final-year Electronics and Communications Engineering student from India. He has a strong passion for robotics and aspires to become a roboticist. His primary areas of interest are in robot perception, simulations, and mechatronics. Over the course of two years, Jasmeet has gained valuable experience in robotics development with ROS, that he acquired through his participation in various competitions, personal projects, and internships. Jasmeet is also the co-founder of a robotics research and development lab at his college called A.T.O.M Robotics Lab. Jasmeet possesses a keen enthusiasm for embedded systems, PCB design, and 3D printing. He frequently combines these interests to build hobby projects and eagerly shares his projects with the community. In his free time, Jasmeet enjoys engaging in sketching, painting, and reading sci-fi novels.
During this year's GSoC, Jasmeet will be collaborating with his mentors, Addisu Teddese and Dharini Dutia, on a project entitled "Automatically Computing Moments of Inertia using SDFormat Links." The project's main objective is to develop a system that can automatically calculate inertial parameters, such as moments of inertia and products of inertia, for a geometric link defined using SDFormat. These inertial parameters are complex to visualize and necessitate physically plausible values to ensure accurate simulations. By automating these calculations, this project aims to reduce the entry barriers for beginners entering the field of robotic simulations. Additionally, it will enhance the workflow for all users by eliminating the need for third-party mesh processing software. Throughout the project, Jasmeet and his mentors will explore different design considerations for the software architecture and examine various mesh processing methods, such as "Voxelization," for calculating the inertial parameters.