Box Pushing in Gazebo

Greetings,

I'm fairly new to Gazebo and am trying to develop a box-pushing system. I'm using a recent SVN version (272), but can update if necessary.

So far I've managed to get the standard Pioneer robot moving around predictably and have placed some 1x1x1 boxes in its path. The robot will push the box, but very, very slowly. It looks like the robot may be making contact with the box too high, and is thus tipping the box slightly away from it, which is causing it to be pushed at an angle that tries to force it into the ground. I suspect that that may be the cause of the slow-down, but am not sure how to tell or how to work around it. I tried modifying the model, but I was getting all sorts of strange effects and wanted to get some advice before spending more time on that angle.

I wasn't able to figure out how to affect the frictional coefficients, but neither playing with the masses of the robot and/or box, nor changing the gravitational force seemed to help with the problem.

Any thoughts on the matter would be much appreciated. If anyone knows of any working examples or any relevant documentation, that would be great as well.

Thanks