A Comparison of Humanoid Robot Simulators: A Quantitative Approach

TL;DR

This paper quantitatively compares Gazebo, Webots, and V-REP simulators based on resource usage during robotic scenario execution, highlighting Webots as the most resource-efficient option.

Contribution

It provides a systematic, quantitative evaluation of three popular humanoid robot simulators, aiding researchers in selecting appropriate tools.

Findings

Webots has the lowest resource consumption.

V-REP uses less CPU than Gazebo.

Webots outperforms others in resource efficiency.

Abstract

Research on humanoid robotic systems involves a considerable amount of computational resources, not only for the involved design but also for its development and subsequent implementation. For robotic systems to be implemented in real-world scenarios, in several situations, it is preferred to develop and test them under controlled environments in order to reduce the risk of errors and unexpected behavior. In this regard, a more accessible and efficient alternative is to implement the environment using robotic simulation tools. This paper presents a quantitative comparison of Gazebo, Webots, and V-REP, three simulators widely used by the research community to develop robotic systems. To compare the performance of these three simulators, elements such as CPU, memory footprint, and disk access are used to measure and compare them to each other. In order to measure the use of resources, each simulator executes 20 times a robotic scenario composed by a NAO robot that must navigate to a goal position avoiding a specific obstacle. In general terms, our results show that Webots is the simulator with the lowest use of resources, followed by V-REP, which has advantages over Gazebo, mainly because of the CPU use.