osrf-migration
commented
5 years ago Original comment by Louise Poubel (Bitbucket: chapulina, GitHub: chapulina).
Thank you for the suggestion, @MatthijsBurgh .
To give you some context, in the past, the kind of functionality you're suggesting has been implemented in Gazebo as plugins which are attached to elements that are already present on SDF, such as the world. See the Contain Plugin for example.
Original report (archived issue) by Matthijs van der Burgh (Bitbucket: MatthijsBurgh).
Summary
SDF doesn't contain any elements for virtual geometries. Virtual geometries could be used in multiple ways. For example event triggerring or limiting behaviour, position. I am interested in how you would implement it in SDF.
My suggestion would be: tag: virtual_area parent: link childs: name, frame, pose, geometry(, plugin)
Motivation
The virtual area could be useful for:
More in general the virtual area can be used for checking if certain objects are located somewhere in space. Or to apply limits in space for almost anything: models, actors, population, physics, etc,
Describe alternatives you've considered
I couldn't find anything already in SDF suitable for this. World, State and Scene, don't have anything in there, which could match this. In my opinion the best solution is to define these in models. So this area can be used for events/limits relative to a model.