Chapter 3. Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo

After designing the 3D model of a robot, the next phase is its simulation. Robot simulation will give you an idea about the working of robots in a virtual environment.

We are going to use the Gazebo (http://www.gazebosim.org/) simulator to simulate the seven DOF arms and the mobile robot.

Gazebo is a multirobot simulator for complex indoor and outdoor robotic simulation. We can simulate complex robots, robot sensors, and a variety of 3D objects. Gazebo already has simulation models of popular robots, sensors, and a variety of 3D objects in their repository (https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models/). We can directly use these models without having the need to create.

Gazebo has a good interface in ROS, which exposes the whole control of Gazebo in ROS. We can install Gazebo without ROS and we should install the ROS-Gazebo interface to communicate from ROS to Gazebo.

In this chapter, we will discuss more on simulation of seven DOF arms...