Hello everyone,
Our lab is planning to use a UR7e, and we are currently choosing a simulation solution. In practical development and research projects, do you more commonly use UR’s own simulation tools (URSim and UR Studio), or general-purpose robotics simulators such as Gazebo and Isaac Sim?
Would the lab be programming mainly in PolyScope/URScript, or mainly through ROS 2? URSim runs the actual controller software, so it’s the closest to the real arm for testing programs. Gazebo or Isaac makes more sense if you need sensors or a full scene around the robot.
I would agree, it really depends on what you want to do.
Whenever URSim suits my requirements, I use that for simulating the arm, as it gets me closest to what the real robot does and can do. So, if you plan to do simulation for logic integration testing or things like that, this is the perfect solution.
If you want to incorporate other sensors and the joint_trajectory_controller is the only controller you will use in the end, then Gazebo / MuJoCo, etc might be more suitable for what you want to do.
Another question you might ask yourself: Do you have any other hardware components to test? For example a gripper or a mobile platform. In those cases you’d have to ask yourself whether you would be fine with “simulating” those using mock hardware, otherwise you might need to go for a full physics simulator, anyway.