5 Virtual robots and simulation
This chapter covers
- Simulation concepts and use cases
- Dealing with the sim-to-real gap
- Using the Gazebo robotics simulator together with ROS
Chapter 1 answered the question of what makes something a robot. We concluded that robots are programmable general-purpose machines that directly interact with the real world to perform tasks in it. Now consider virtual robots, or robots in simulation. In simulation, there is no interaction with the real world; instead, everything happens virtually. Yet the difference between virtual robots and other kinds of “bots” that we excluded from our definition, such as chatbots and robotic process automation (RPA), remains. Given an ideal simulator, the software running on a virtual robot is the same as the software running on a real robot. The simulator substitutes the real world with a virtual one that the virtual robot interacts with, in the same way, or at least very similarly, to the way the real robot would interact with the real world.