Move Camera to model

This tutorial gives an introduction to Gazebo's service /gui/move_to/model. This service will allow to move the camera to a specific model taking into account distance to the model and camera angle.

How to move the camera to a model

1. Load the View Angle plugin. This service is only available when the View Angle plugin is loaded.
2. Call the service using the request message type gz.msgs.GUICamera and the response message type gz.msgs.Boolean. The distance to the object is defined as the z coordinate, and the direction of the camera with a quaternion. It's possible to select the projection type.

For example, Let's move the camera to the box model looking down from 5 meters away. This example uses the shapes.sdf world.

gz service  -s /gui/move_to/model --reqtype gz.msgs.GUICamera  --reptype gz.msgs.Boolean -r 'name: "box", pose: {position: {z:5}, orientation: {x:0, y:0, z: -1, w:0}}, projection_type: "orbit"' --timeout 5000

The camera can also be placed far away, for example 20 meters:

gz service  -s /gui/move_to/model --reqtype gz.msgs.GUICamera  --reptype gz.msgs.Boolean -r 'name: "box", pose: {position: {z:20}, orientation: {x:0, y:0, z: -1, w:0}}, projection_type: "orbit"' --timeout 5000

In the following gif you can see the workflow of this service: