Gazebo or OpenRave
We're often in the situation with robot prototypes where several teams and/or government groups seem to always need robot access at the very same time. So we're looking at investing some time putting together a simulation of it under the hood, much like the pr2 simulations. With that done, we can simply hand off a black box (maybe atom powered) running a simulation of the robot to whatever group needs access to it at a higher level.
I've had a cursory play with gazebo, and have a fake scanner up and running in a 3d world. It looks like I'll have to write something custom like the controller manager plugin for gazebo (can't use pr2's directly, our motor systems are quite different). At this point I kept coming across ros articles about openrave, so...
What have been people's experiences with gazebo vs openrave for 3d simulations?
