[SOLVED] Visualizing muscles in Gazebo

#1

I am using a local installation of NRP with the intent to work with musculoskeletal models (hybrid SDF/OSIM model) in Gazebo. My local installation consists of Gazebo, SimBody, OpenSim, sdformat and GazeboRosPackages from the master branch of NRP.

I am able to load the mouse_forelimb model in Gazebo with the muscle states showing up as ROS topics. However, Gazebo does not show any muscles.

Is it possible to make Gazebo visualize the muscles? It seems like this is implemented in the NRP’s fork of Gazebo.

#2

Dear Martin,

Muscle visualization is available only in the NRP ExDFrontend (based on a fork of gazebo’s web client, gzweb), not in gzclient (gazebo’s desktop client).

#3

Hmm, I was suspecting it to be the case. Unfortunately, I had issues installing the gzweb fork on Ubuntu 20.04, since there doesn’t seem to be any deploy script.

Do you think it is possible to install and launch gzweb on top of my current local installation? That is, without installing the whole platform.

EDIT:
How about the video in this blog post where the OpenSimMuscleVisual is being used? That seems to be running in gzclient?

#4

I’ve forgot to add “AFAIK” to my previous post :smiley:

You can show the muscles selecting OpenSim muscles from gzclient’s View dropdown menu.

Sorry for the oversight.

#5

I was just about to write that I found it in the View menu by random!

But thanks a bunch for the help - best regards,
Martin