Gazebo or OpenRave

asked 2011-03-11 13:54:48 -0600

Daniel Stonier
3145 ●24 ●51 ●64

updated 2011-03-15 01:00:17 -0600

We're often in the situation with robot prototypes where several teams and/or government groups seem to always need robot access at the very same time. So we're looking at investing some time putting together a simulation of it under the hood, much like the pr2 simulations. With that done, we can simply hand off a black box (maybe atom powered) running a simulation of the robot to whatever group needs access to it at a higher level.

I've had a cursory play with gazebo, and have a fake scanner up and running in a 3d world. It looks like I'll have to write something custom like the controller manager plugin for gazebo (can't use pr2's directly, our motor systems are quite different). At this point I kept coming across ros articles about openrave, so...

What have been people's experiences with gazebo vs openrave for 3d simulations?

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answered 2011-03-13 18:17:56 -0600

Nick H
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updated 2011-03-16 11:24:30 -0600

We use OpenRAVE for all our simulations. After spending a few years running with Gazebo, we made the change to OpenRAVE as we found it more flexible, it better suited our needs and I haven't looked back since. Having said that, I haven't tried Gazebo again for almost 2 years and with all the love it's been getting recently, things might have changed.

The biggest advantages we found were that OpenRAVE's plugin architecture allowed us to simply swap bits in and out (e.g. change the phsyics engine) without having to look deep into the code base, and the combination of a python and C++ API allowed very quick development.

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