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As far as I know most robotics research is done offline, i.e. in a simulation (e.g. via gazebo, ROS, etc.). Obviously one has and does make the step to reality

As far as I know most robotics research is done offline, i.e. in a simulation (e.g. via gazebo, ROS, etc.). Obviously one has and does make the step to reality eventually (which is always messy), but you can go miles using simulation only. I would even say the learning curve from nothing (however being proficient in basic CS and programming) to successful demonstrations and experiments in a simulator is steeper, than from simulation to real robot. The first step is time and the second step money consuming.

kctess5 10y ago
This is accurate. I've seen people use multiple levels of simulation complexity. That way they can learn the basics in a simple environment and use that as a prior for the more complex (and therefore slower/more costly to run) simulators. It's like bootstrapping up to the real thing. In general being able to run things in the simulator is critical to software testing. If your only method of doing integration testing and parameter optimization is the real robot, it will be a bad time, quite possibly leading to a crashed robot.
- protomikron 10y ago
  I totally agree. Personal rant incoming: I think the ideas and intentions of ROS, gazebo and co. are great, but in my humble opinion things are a lot more complicated than they should be (as always in the world of software). First I think that the robotics world has a non-free vibe going on, in particular from industries who are big in the robotics building business. They mostly ship their own broken (sometimes Windows-only) API for their robot and it is mostly a mess. In particular they often do too much stuff, like providing proprietary shitty cartesian path planning or developing strange in-house communication protocols. I know that this is hard realtime territory and stuff is hard, but I feel definitely a tension between the mostly robotics researcher software crowd and the providers of the "real" thing, the actual robot, e.g. a manipulator, which is still in the 100.000 euros. Secondly I am afraid that ROS is going down the Corba path. The very fact that they ship their own build system (an ongoing debatte on the ros mailing list) rings alarm bells for me and I hope that they can move forward. However, kudos to the developers! Robotics is a hard and interdisciplinary topic, so one inherits all the problems of the software AND hardware world.

kctess5 10y ago

This is accurate. I've seen people use multiple levels of simulation complexity. That way they can learn the basics in a simple environment and use that as a prior for the more complex (and therefore slower/more costly to run) simulators. It's like bootstrapping up to the real thing. In general being able to run things in the simulator is critical to software testing. If your only method of doing integration testing and parameter optimization is the real robot, it will be a bad time, quite possibly leading to a crashed robot.

protomikron 10y ago
I totally agree. Personal rant incoming: I think the ideas and intentions of ROS, gazebo and co. are great, but in my humble opinion things are a lot more complicated than they should be (as always in the world of software). First I think that the robotics world has a non-free vibe going on, in particular from industries who are big in the robotics building business. They mostly ship their own broken (sometimes Windows-only) API for their robot and it is mostly a mess. In particular they often do too much stuff, like providing proprietary shitty cartesian path planning or developing strange in-house communication protocols. I know that this is hard realtime territory and stuff is hard, but I feel definitely a tension between the mostly robotics researcher software crowd and the providers of the "real" thing, the actual robot, e.g. a manipulator, which is still in the 100.000 euros. Secondly I am afraid that ROS is going down the Corba path. The very fact that they ship their own build system (an ongoing debatte on the ros mailing list) rings alarm bells for me and I hope that they can move forward. However, kudos to the developers! Robotics is a hard and interdisciplinary topic, so one inherits all the problems of the software AND hardware world.