Mobile robot simulation with which simulator?

Question

Hi there,

i want to create a simulation for a mobile robot (lunar rover) in a specific environment with consideration of dust and rocks and so on. The main focus will be on navigation with LIDAR and/or stereo vision and the handling characteristics in the lunar testbed. The simulation should be as most real as possible.

Should i use Gazebo, V-REP or an other simulator to do this? Is there any paper with a comparison of the use of simulators for mobile platforms?

Best regards Max

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Originally posted by vonunwerth on ROS Answers with karma: 66 on 2018-04-29

Post score: 0

Answer 1

This paper: http://www.dca.fee.unicamp.br/~gudwin/courses/IA889/2014/IA889-02.pdf [1] describes a set of experiments comparing V-rep and Gazebo for simulation. It is a fairly old paper but the results still hold true in my experience.

Simulation is V-rep with the rocky environment can be easily constructed while that in Gazebo may be harder. You can also add the LiDAR and 3D camera sensors on the robot while using the Lua child scripts to publish messages on topics to interface with ROS. See RosInterface: http://www.coppeliarobotics.com/helpFiles/en/rosInterf.htm

Hope this helps.

[1] Nogueira, Lucas. "Comparative analysis between gazebo and v-rep robotic simulators." Seminario Interno de Cognicao Artificial-SICA 2014 (2014): 5

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Originally posted by hc with karma: 114 on 2018-05-01

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Answer 2

Since December 2018, Webots was released as free open source software (Apache 2.0 license), so it could be another option to consider, given its ROS interface and advanced lidar and camera sensors, see https://cyberbotics.com and https://github.com/omichel/webots

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Originally posted by Olivier Michel with karma: 31 on 2019-03-22

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1