Best Robot Simulation Software for Linux

Cyberbotics' Webots is an open source, multi-platform desktop application designed for modeling, programming, and simulating robots. It offers a comprehensive development environment that includes a vast asset library with robots, sensors, actuators, objects, and materials, facilitating rapid prototyping and efficient robotics project development. Users can import existing CAD models from tools like Blender or URDF and integrate OpenStreetMap data to create detailed simulations. Webots supports programming in multiple languages, including C, C++, Python, Java, MATLAB, and ROS, providing flexibility for diverse development needs. Its modern GUI, combined with a physics engine and OpenGL rendering, enables realistic simulation of various robotic systems, such as wheeled robots, industrial arms, legged robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles. The platform is widely utilized in industry, education, and research for tasks like robot prototyping, and AI algorithm development.

Gazebo is an open source robotics simulator that provides high-fidelity physics, rendering, and sensor models for developing and testing robot applications. It supports multiple physics engines, including ODE, Bullet, and Simbody, enabling accurate dynamics simulation. Gazebo offers advanced 3D graphics through rendering engines like OGRE v2, delivering realistic environments with high-quality lighting, shadows, and textures. It includes a wide array of sensors, such as laser range finders, 2D/3D cameras, IMUs, GPS, and more, with the ability to simulate sensor noise. Users can develop custom plugins for robot, sensor, and environment control, and interact with simulations via a plugin-based graphical interface powered by Gazebo GUI. Gazebo provides access to numerous robot models, including PR2, Pioneer2 DX, iRobot Create, and TurtleBot, and allows users to build new models using SDF.