ROS2 as an Interface for a Motorcycle Simulator

Simulators have been used for decades in many different areas. Military and aerospace were the first areas where simulators appeared to train people and more. More recently, we have assisted to the emergence of a multitude of simulators in many other contexts. One of them is automobiles and motorcycles.External devices, such as touch-screen displays, are often part of these simulator environments to make them more realistic and test new concepts and ideas. Usually, to expand its functionalities, simulators allow the integration of external devices, requiring those devices to be coupled to the simulators’ extension mechanisms and behaviour. This is often a difficult task as it requires to learn about the extension mechanisms, and when moving the devices to other simulators, part of the code must be rewritten.This paper shows how ROS2, a well-known and accepted middleware for robotic as well as automotive applications, can also play a role in these contexts acting as a universal interface between external devices and a simulator, thereby significantly improving portability and reusability of external devices as well as opening the simulator to the vast possibilities offered by the ROS2 ecosystem.