Chapter 4: Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo
After designing the 3D model of a robot, the next phase is to simulate it. Robot simulation will give you an idea of how robots operate in a virtual environment.
We are going to use the Gazebo (http://www.gazebosim.org/) simulator to simulate the seven Degree Of Freedom (DOF) arms and the mobile robot.
Gazebo is a multi-robot 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 its repository (https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models/). We can directly use these models without having to create new ones.
Gazebo is perfectly integrated with ROS thanks to a proper ROS interface, which exposes the complete control of Gazebo in ROS. We can install Gazebo without ROS, but we should install the ROS-Gazebo interface to communicate from ROS to Gazebo.
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