Simulation packages for robotics

[Simulation]

What simulation packages exist for robotics? Do they have accurate physics simulation so that you can build a virtual robot and expect it sct the same way in tve simulation as when you build it?

[newInRobotics]

Robots in real world will almost never act the same way in simulation. You have to understand that simulation is only estimation of a real world events, hence You can use sim only to get common sense of how Your robot would behave in perfect conditions. Real world is real world and it normaly cannot be predicted.

To answer Your question, there are few sims:

• ABB Robot Studio used to simulate robotic arms
• Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 used to simulate mobile robots
• Webots 6 used to simulate mobile robots

[Simulation]

That's a strange statement. I have worked with simulations for 20 years but am pretty new to robotics. A simulation represents reality through a _model_ and a model has a certain range of validity depending on what you want to study, predict or understand better. My general experience is that simulations are amazingly powerful, but require lots of experience and attention, and can so be expensive if you want to get it right.
RobotStudio has no physics simulation in it, other than what is in the robot controller. Microsoft's software is using game physics (physx) and so is webots (ode) (at least wikipedia says so) so obviously none has attempted to do any sort of serious modeling in those packages.
Abb robotstudio is more like a motion planner/programmer software than a dynamics simulator and for that it works well I hear. Aren't there any other alternatives?

[madsci1016]

Robots in real world will almost never act the same way in simulation.

That's a strange statement.

And also a very accurate statement. I work for the US Navy in robotics, and we use simulation only to verify new code, and when we really don't want to risk damage/losing the million dollar robots. And even then simulation isn't really regarded as a good test of something new.

In the few years I've worked there and the handful of tests I've seen, never has a field test ever matched simulation the first, tenth or any try in between.

Now I may have to preface that with one if: If you are talking about simulating a Roomba bouncing around a square room, I bet a real Roomba bouncing around a square room will match. Simple environments will easily match simulation. But when we talk about multiple autonomous underwater vehicles cooperatively hunting for and classifying targets on the sea floor, simulation doesn't even begin to come close to real world testing. It comes down to how much of a controlled environment are we talking about?

For simulating a robot design, I don't know of any programs. Robots are highly complex, it would be hard to create real world physics models. I mean, you could have noise generated by a servo effect sensor readings, tolerances in components differ, there's a million simple things that could affect a robot that it would be hard to model them all.