Gazebo
Gazebo is a free and open source robot simulation environment developed by Willow Garage. As a multifunctional tool for ROS robot developers, Gazebo supports the following:
- Designing of robot models
- Rapid prototyping and testing of algorithms
- Regression testing using realistic scenarios
- Simulation of indoor and outdoor environments
- Simulation of sensor data for laser range finders, 2D/3D cameras, kinect-style sensors, contact sensors, force-torque, and more
- Advanced 3D objects and environments utilizing Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE)
- Several high-performance physics engines (Open Dynamics Engine (ODE), Bullet, Simbody, and Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit (DART)) to model the real-world dynamics
In this section, we will load our two-wheeled robot URDF into Gazebo to visualize it in a 3D environment. Gazebo allows you to take control of some aspects of our model without an external control program. In the later chapters, we will be using simulated versions of robots...
