Bring your simulations to life!
The human_actor_plugin is a lightweight and configurable Gazebo Classic plugin that lets you spawn and animate human-like actors in simulation — either along a predefined path or by streaming live pose commands from ROS.

Give your robots someone to interact with!

• ✅ ROS Integration – control human pose via ROS topics
• 🧭 Namespace & topic configurable – spawn multiple humans with isolated control
• 🎯 Real-time control – command actor motion from a joystick, planner, or script
• 🔄 Trajectory playback – follow predefined paths (CSV, spline, etc.)
• 🛠️ Minimal dependencies – works with ROS Noetic and Gazebo Classic

Clone this repo into your Catkin workspace:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ARSControl/human_actor_plugin.git
cd ..
catkin_make

roslaunch human_actor_plugin demo.launch

This will:

• Start Gazebo with a human model

• Spawn the plugin

• Subscribe to /human_0/actor_pose by default

rostopic pub /human_0/actor_pose geometry_msgs/PoseStamped \ '{ pose: { position: { x: 1.0, y: 2.0, z: 0.0 }, orientation: { w: 1.0 } } }'

In your model's SDF or Xacro file:

    <plugin  name="human_actor_plugin"  filename="libhuman_actor_plugin.so"> 
        <ros_namespace>human_0</ros_namespace> 
        <ros_topic>actor_pose</ros_topic> 
    </plugin> 

These parameters allow multiple independent humans in the same simulation.

human_actor_plugin/
├── launch/ # Demo launch files 
├── models/ # SDF/Xacro model of the human 
├── src/ # Plugin source code 
├── CMakeLists.txt
├── package.xml
└── README.md

• Animation support (walk cycle)

• Trajectory from CSV

• Rviz marker control

• Crowd simulation integration

Pull requests and issues are welcome!
If you’ve made your human walk, run, or dance — show it off and open a PR 🕺💃

Mattia Catellani
GitHub: @MatCat960

Tip: Want to control humans with a joystick or from a path planner? This plugin plays nice with anything that publishes PoseStamped.