A Systematic Approach to Learning Robot Programming with ROS

II

Simulation and Visualization in ROS

INTRODUCTION

Valuable characteristics of ROS include its simulation and visualization capabilities. When software development can be performed only on specific hardware (e.g. a particular robot), productivity plummets. A physical robot is typically a bottleneck for development, because it is a limited resource presumably shared by a team. Further, some robots, including vehicles and humanoids, require teams to run experiments. Most often, the robot and team are idling while a programmer is seeking errors in code under test.

With a suitable robot simulator, code can be developed under simulation, allowing work to proceed in parallel and without imposing on a support staff for experiments. If the simulator ...