USARSim/ROS: A Combined Framework for Robotic Control and Simulation

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is steadily gaining popularity among robotics researchers as an open source framework for robot control. Additionally, the Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation (USARSim) has already been used for many years by robotics researchers and developers as a validated framework for simulation. This paper presents a new ROS node that is designed to seamlessly interface between ROS and USARSim. It provides for automatic configuration of ROS transforms and topics to allow for full utilization of the simulated hardware. The design of the new node, as well as examples of its use for mobile robot and robotic arm control are presented.