A Systematic Comparison of Simulation Software for Robotic Arm Manipulation using ROS2

TL;DR

This paper systematically compares ROS2-compatible simulation software for robotic arm manipulation, evaluating stability, resource use, and task success to guide future robotics research and digital twin applications.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive benchmark of ROS2 simulation tools specifically for robotic arm manipulation, highlighting their strengths and limitations.

Findings

Ignition and Webots show higher stability.

PyBullet and Coppeliasim use fewer resources.

No single software outperforms others in all aspects.

Abstract

Simulation software is a powerful tool for robotics research, allowing the virtual representation of the real world. However with the rise of the Robot Operating System (ROS), there are new simulation software packages that have not been compared within the literature. This paper proposes a systematic review of simulation software that are compatible with ROS version 2. The focus is research in robotics arm manipulation as it represents the most often used robotic application in industry and their future applicability to digital twins. For this, we thus benchmark simulation software under similar parameters, tasks and scenarios, and evaluate them in terms of their capability for long-term operations, success at completing a task, repeatability and resource usage. We find that there is no best simulation software overall, but two simulation packages (Ignition and Webots) have higher stability than other while, in terms of resources usage, PyBullet and Coppeliasim consume less than their competitors.