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I take it this is a side project then ? Well ROS only deals with communication between different software and middleware components. If you need a physical simulation for your robot and want to be able to switch between controlling the real robot and it's simulated counterpart the Ros + Rviz + Gazebo software packages is what you will want.

Gazebo is a physics simulator, which is meant to represent the real physical world with your robot. A good Gazebo tutorial here shows how to control a stick robot with a camera and IR sensor.

For ROS it is much easier there are plenty of good tutorials such as the turtle bot ones: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingTopics.

Rviz is a visualisation display, it is to show you the state of the robot and all sensory information available. You use this both when you are running your simulation in Gazebo and when you are running the real robot.