Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to simulate your robot in Gazebo.

You first discovered how Gazebo works. Gazebo is a 3D simulation tool that can simulate gravity and the physical properties of your robot in the environment—unlike RViz, which is only a visualization tool, helpful for developing and debugging.

Then, you followed the process to simulate a robot in Gazebo. Here is a recap of the steps:

1. Before you even get started, make sure you have a URDF that properly describes all the links and joints of your robot (this is what we did in the previous chapters).
2. Adapt the URDF for Gazebo by adding <inertial> and <collision> tags for each link. You can use RViz to visualize those properties and make sure they are correct.
3. Spawn the robot in Gazebo. To do this, you first start the Gazebo simulator and the robot_state_publisher node. Then, you can spawn the robot.
4. Control the robot with plugins (i.e., systems). To use a system, you...