get iris ready with upstream

[ffurrer]

I quickly got iris running, by these adjustments... so probably similar ones have to be made for ardrone and vtol, it would be nice if you could just get all your launch files running

[ffurrer]

if you want your own props, which I would appreciate, then we should add this parameter to the vertical_rotor macro. I guess you had it in there at some point :)

[LorenzMeier]

Yes, that would be great.

[LorenzMeier]

Thanks for this! I'll re-do the models using this pattern and send a much smaller PR against upstream.

[LorenzMeier]

@ffurrer How open would you be to completely factor out the ROS interface in rotors (as its own plugin)? The reason I ask is that the ROS dependency is quite heavy for us (e.g. on Mac OS or Windows) and the Gazebo Protobuf API would fix that issue for us:
http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=custom_messages

This is similar in spirit as it adds the MAVLink interface as a plugin:
https://github.com/PX4/rotors_simulator/pull/4/files

We're messing with other simulators right now for other platforms, and I'd like to converge on Gazebo. Also the runtime performance is a bit of a concern, since we need to run much faster than realtime - maybe detach front and backend and only render every 10th iteration?

[markusachtelik]

I see the point -- we however don't have the resources to do this right now, but we'd be happy to accept PRs ;). I would like to avoid protobuf to ros conversion nodes and would thus favor conditional compilation and detect whether ros is available or not. We probably best discuss this while having a coffee, I have a few ideas on this.