Simulating Robots in a Realistic Environment

Building a new robot from scratch takes time and can be expensive. After getting the robot’s requirements, we will first design it and create a 3D model of the robot. In the previous chapter, we saw how to build the kinematic and dynamic model of the robot using URDF. This chapter will discuss how to simulate the robot using Gazebo and ROS 2 to iterate on the robot model created and identify any issues in the designed model. The simulation is crucial in robot development because it allows for easy verification of the design without incurring any hardware costs. The simulation can’t replicate the actual robot hardware properties completely, but it can give an overall idea of how the system works.

In this chapter, we will see how to simulate a robot in Gazebo Sim using the ROS URDF model. We will use Gazebo Sim plugins and the ROS 2 controller to simulate and control the robot. After simulating different robots in Gazebo...