Gazebo or OpenRave

Question

We're often in the situation with robot prototypes where several teams and/or government groups seem to always need robot access at the very same time. So we're looking at investing some time putting together a simulation of it under the hood, much like the pr2 simulations. With that done, we can simply hand off a black box (maybe atom powered) running a simulation of the robot to whatever group needs access to it at a higher level.

I've had a cursory play with gazebo, and have a fake scanner up and running in a 3d world. It looks like I'll have to write something custom like the controller manager plugin for gazebo (can't use pr2's directly, our motor systems are quite different). At this point I kept coming across ros articles about openrave, so...

What have been people's experiences with gazebo vs openrave for 3d simulations?

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Originally posted by Daniel Stonier on ROS Answers with karma: 3170 on 2011-03-11

Post score: 7

Answer 1

We use OpenRAVE for all our simulations. After spending a few years running with Gazebo, we made the change to OpenRAVE as we found it more flexible, it better suited our needs and I haven't looked back since. Having said that, I haven't tried Gazebo again for almost 2 years and with all the love it's been getting recently, things might have changed.

The biggest advantages we found were that OpenRAVE's plugin architecture allowed us to simply swap bits in and out (e.g. change the phsyics engine) without having to look deep into the code base, and the combination of a python and C++ API allowed very quick development.

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Originally posted by Nick H with karma: 214 on 2011-03-13

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 8

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Original comments

Comment by Arkapravo on 2011-11-04:
@Nick H : Interesting, I have had my issues with gazebo. OpenRave may be worth a try.

Comment by ratneshmadaan on 2014-05-28:
Agreed completely.