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Your simulated robot needs odometry and laser data to create maps. Odometry typically comes from your gazebo controller plugin. I used a controller from the hector_gazebo_plugins package (see http://wiki.ros.org/hector_gazebo_plugins). To generate simulated laser scan data you can use e.g. the Hokuyo plugin (see http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=ros_gzplugins&cat=connect_ros#GPULaser).

If you do not have a simulated robot yet, you might want to start with an already existing robot model for Gazebo, like the TurtleBot simulator (http://wiki.ros.org/turtlebot_simulator). There are also tutorials around for using gmapping or amcl on the TurtleBot (see http://wiki.ros.org/turtlebot_navigation). These tutorials should also work on a simulated TurtleBot.

Good luck!