Robotics Simulator

Question

Which is the best robotics simulator ?

1. Player Project (#) (simulator + control interface)
2. Microsoft Robotics Studio (simulator + control interface)
3. KiKS (in Matlab, only for Khepera + control interface)
4. MobotSim (for point like robots, more of algorithm implementation )
5. ROS (currently the largest integration of such platforms)
6. URBI (#)
7. Karel (Pretty Kiddish, I guess it is Pascal/Logo like)
8. Peekabot (Looks really cool ! )
9. MRPT (looks very nice, will try it soon)
10. Carmen (Robot Vision etc is easy to implement in it (?))
11. Webbot
12. ORCOS (Don't know anything about it !)

(#) : A part of ROS

As of now, I am just looking to get simple simulations of Potential Field method, Bug Algorithms, A* Algorithm etc !

This article gives a number of such softwares etc, however I was looking for a first hand view from fellow coders. Anyone who has worked with any other software etc is most welcome to share his/her experience !

UPDATE : Wonderful paper, Development environments for autonomous mobile robots: A survey

Answer 1

It sounds like all you need is a 2D simulator. So i would avoid the overhead and headaches of a 3D simulator. Some notes on your choices:

1. Player includes a 2D simulator (Stage) and a 3D physics simulator (Gazeebo) which i think uses ODE

2. MRDS includes a 3D physics simulator by PhysX

3. ROS is only an architecture and i don't believe it has its own simulator. although it does have some different visualization tools. it also wraps Player.

Another popular simulator / architecture is WeBots. But i think that is only 3D.

That's all i know. Good luck. -Ben

Answer 2

I would go for a commonly used framework. As you are interested in path planning, pick a framework that already has simulated robots, and just write the planning services you need to generate paths for it.

ROS is very cool, and has quite a large selection of useful perception services, as well as the full PR2 stack. It uses gazebo (part of player/stage) for simulation, and includes a few off the shelf robots (erratic would be ideal for this). Its quite new, but very active.

MRDS has several suitable robots, and frankly better simulated environments then ROS, but not quite as much by way of high level services. The lego robot simulator would be fine for what you want to do, and gives you the choice of validating on real hardware cheaply in the future.

These two have the lions share of developers at the moment. Really the decision boils down to whether you are happier developing in visual studio under windows, or on linux platforms. Both are free for students (MSRS is under ELMS / dreamspark programs), both have a learning curve, both have pretty good community support. For MRDS, go sign up to the forum, for ROS, join the mailing list.

Answer 3

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.

I don't know if it's the best simulator, but I've enjoyed using it.

EDIT In response to Arkapravo's comment.

I have written a .NET API for writing your own RoboCup 3D agents called TinMan.

There are a bunch of videos on YouTube of simulated 3D soccer matches. This is one of my favourites.

RoboCup 2010 is taking place this week in Singapore, though unfortunately I won't be able to make it.

RoboCup 3D runs on a physical simulation engine called SimSpark. It has a comprehensive Wiki with lots of information explaining how it all works.

My agent is still quite primitive, so I don't have anything published about it just yet. There are plenty of open source agent implementations in different languages if you're interested.

Answer 4

ODE anyone ? I have used it a lot in my micromouse projects..

Answer 5

peekabot is not a simulator, only a visualization tool, and to some extent a tool to control your robot interactively. It's a good match for use in conjunction with a simulator without its own visualization, though.

MRPT doesn't have a (complete) simulator AFAIK, only algorithms, interfaces, drivers and its own log format. Besides that, it looks neat.

OpenRAVE might be worth checking out if you're interested in planning.

Gazebo wasn't really mature and stable enough last I tried it (~1 year ago). Might be worth to check out though.

Stage is simple to use, provided that you need only a 2D simulator without dynamics.

I've used both ODE and Bullet for robotics simulations, and both worked okay although I would recommend ODE.

To get a more definitive answer you need to refine your requirements -- i.e. are you looking for a simulator only or something more like ROS, do you need a 3D simulator with dynamics or only 2D, how accurate must it be, what sensors do you want to simulate, etc.

Answer 6

Urbi is not a simulator. It's a middleware platform, which relies on parallel and event-driven script language. It is now open source and features support for ROS, which means you should use both! Here's some information about Urbi: www.urbiforge.org

And last but not least, it's easy to use for beginners.

Hope all the information you got helps you choose the right simulator for you!