Best Robot Simulation Software for Linux

RoboDK is a powerful and cost-effective simulator for industrial robots and robot programming. RoboDK simulation software allows you to get the most out of your robot. No programming skills are required with RoboDK's intuitive interface. You can easily program any robot offline with just a few clicks. RoboDK has an extensive library with over 500 robot arms. The advantage of using RoboDK's simulation and offline programming tools is that it allows you to program robots outside the production environment. With RoboDK you can program robots directly from your computer and eliminate production downtime caused by shop floor programming. Use your robot arm like a 5-axis milling machine (CNC) or a 3D printer. Simulate and convert NC programs to robot programs (G-code or APT-CLS files). RoboDK will automatically optimize the robot path, avoiding singularities, axis limits and collisions. Simulation and Offline Programming of industrial robots has never been easier.

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.

SCAPE CoCreator is a no-code robotic automation platform that empowers users to build, simulate, and deploy robotic workflows without programming expertise. It seamlessly integrates hardware and software within a user-friendly environment, enabling the creation of robotic applications powered by 3D vision and AI. Users can test and validate solutions in a digital twin environment and on actual hardware, significantly reducing development time and costs, up to 95% compared to traditional methods. It supports effortless integration with 3D scanners conforming to the GenICam standard, ensuring smooth communication and operation. With support for Python and C++, CoCreator allows for the development of custom solutions tailored to specific tasks. Its intuitive interface enables users to create robotic applications without any coding, making it accessible to users of all skill levels.

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.

CoppeliaSim, developed by Coppelia Robotics, is a versatile and powerful robot simulation platform utilized for rapid algorithm development, factory automation simulations, fast prototyping and verification, robotics education, remote monitoring, safety double-checking, and digital twin creation. It features a distributed control architecture, allowing each object or model to be individually controlled via embedded scripts (Python or Lua), plugins (C/C++), remote API clients (Python, Lua, Java, MATLAB, Octave, C, C++, Rust), or custom solutions. The simulator supports five physics engines, MuJoCo, Bullet Physics, ODE, Newton, and Vortex Dynamics, for fast and customizable dynamics calculations, enabling realistic simulation of real-world physics and object interactions, including collision response, grasping, soft bodies, strings, ropes, and cloths. CoppeliaSim provides forward and inverse kinematics calculations for any type of mechanism.

PyBullet is a Python module for physics simulation, robotics, and deep reinforcement learning, built on the Bullet Physics SDK. It supports loading articulated bodies from URDF, SDF, and other formats, providing forward dynamics simulation, inverse dynamics computation, kinematics, collision detection, and ray intersection queries. PyBullet offers rendering capabilities, including a CPU renderer and OpenGL visualization, with support for virtual reality headsets. It is utilized in various research projects, such as Assistive Gym, which leverages PyBullet for physical human-robot interaction and assistive robotics, supporting collaborative robots and physically assistive tasks. Another project, Kubric, is an open source Python framework interfacing with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes with rich annotations, scaling to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines.

MORAI offers a digital twin simulation platform that accelerates the development and testing of autonomous vehicles, urban air mobility, and maritime autonomous surface ships. Built with high-definition maps and a powerful physics engine, it bridges the gap between real-world and simulation test environments, providing all key elements for verifying autonomous systems, including autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned ship systems. It provides a variety of sensor models, including cameras, LiDAR, GPS, radar, and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). Users can generate complex and diverse test scenarios from real-world data, including log-based scenarios and edge case scenarios. MORAI's cloud simulation allows for safe, cost-effective, and scalable testing, enabling multiple simulations to run concurrently and evaluate different scenarios in parallel.