Robot simulation environments

Question

I would like to make a list of remarkable robot simulation environments including advantages and disadvantages of them. Some examples I know of are Webots and Player/Stage.

Answer 1

This made me remember the breve project.

breve is a free, open-source software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of multi-agent systems and artificial life.

There is also a wikipage listing Robotics simulators

Answer 2

It's not as impressive looking as Webots, but RobotBasic is free, easy to learn, and useful for prototyping simple robot movement algorithms. You can also program a BasicStamp from the IDE.

Answer 3

Microsoft Robotics Studio/Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

Also read this article on MSDN Magazine

Answer 4

ABB has a quite a solution called RobotStudio for simulating their huge industrial robots. I don't think it's free and I don't guess you'll get much fun out of it but it's quite impressive. Here's a page about it

Answer 5

I have been working with Carmen http://carmen.sourceforge.net/ and find it useful.

One of the disadvantages with Carmen is the documentation with all respect I think the webpage is a bit outdated and insufficient. So I like to hear from other people with experience in working with Carmen, or student reports/projects dealing with Carmen.

Answer 6

ROS will visualize your robot and any data you've recorded from it.

Packages to check out would rviz and nav_view

Answer 7

National Instruments' LabView is a graphical programming environment for developing measurement, test, and control systems. It could be used for 3D control simulation with SolidWorks.

Answer 8

I've been programming against SimSpark. It's the open-source simulation engine behind the RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League.

It's extensible for different simulations. You can plug in your own sensors, actuators and models using C++, Ruby and/or RSG (Ruby Scene Graph) files.