Fast headless robot simulator
It seems that Gazebo (wiki.ros.org/simulator_gazebo/Tutorials/RunningSimulatorHeadless) Stage (ros.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/roswiki/stage.html) and STDR (wiki.ros.org/stdr_simulator) can run in headless mode.
I'm looking to sample, as fast as possible, the outcome of some policy for a mobile robot.
This is a reinforcement learning project and it would be prohibitive to have a episode run for say 30 secs.
The presence of noise is preferable but physical realism is not required. Ideally, I would want to deploy my experiment over Amazon EC2. At the abstract level, I'd want to simulator to take an initial state and policy and return the trajectory that the system followed. I would almost use it as a "local planner".
Ideally, I could simulate multiple episodes in parallel across different processes. I can see this as a being a problem due to the client/server architecture.
What would you recommend among Gazebo, Stage or STDR ?
Would OpenRAVE be a better fit ?