I use gazebo to simulate a robot arm. To control its joints, I use PID controllers. As you might know, PID are sometimes pretty hard to tune and this is the case for a robotic arm. To avoid any tuning, and because I don't need the PID values to be realistic, I set to zero the derivative and integral parameters, increase a lot the proportional gain and add a lot of damping in my joints. By doing this, I can get a well working arm but only if I disable the gravity.
My question is the following. Do you have an idea how I could simulate a very strong actuator with not necessarily realistic parameters?
EDIT 1: Setting the integral and derivative gain is stupid. The integral gain helps in correcting the effect of the gravity. The derivative gain counters the loss of stability and speed due to the integral gain.
This question somehow leads to another. Do you know what tuning do the robotic arm manufacturer (big arms for car industry for example). I guess that this arm use actuators with a very strong torque and a low maximum speed which reduces the need of tuning.
EDIT 2: More info on my setup. I use gazebo 6, with ODE. The robot description is in SDF. I control the robot with a model plugin. As a PID controler I use the PID class from the common library of gazebo and get directly the JointControler associated to the model.
Let say that I would like actuators very robust without any tuning needed. This way I could have a simulation WITH dynamics (by opposition to the SetPosition method). Do you think it is possible ?