This week I have proposed to present some little known projects. And today it's time to show what it is gazebo, a simulator of multiple robots in an open world outdoors. As with Stage (part of the Player project), it is capable of simulating a series of robots, sensors and objects in a three-dimensional world. That can realistically generate feedback for sensors when interacting with objects on the digital map.
And the best thing is that Gazebo is price quotation and it is available to install on GNU / Linux distros. In fact, it is available in the Ubuntu Software center itself if you don't want to complicate life too much in the installation. But if you want to know more about the project or download it directly from the official website of the project, you can access its download site.
If you would like to see more videos, you can continue learning more about Gazebo in the channel they have in Youtube. You also have this other material at your fingertips:
As for Gazebo, it has the following technical characteristics:
- Dynamic simulation, with access to multiple high-performance physics engines including ODE, Bullet, Simbody, and DART.
- Advanced 3D graphics, using OGRE you can generate environments and render realistic shapes, textures, lights, shadows, etc.
- Sensors and noise, you can get very interesting data.
- Plugins, so that developers can customize robots, sensors and control environments thanks to its API.
- Many robot models, including PR2, Pioneer2 DX, iRobot Create, TurtleBot, or build your own using SDF.