Simulation is important for robotics but a realistic simulation is what is useful for most roboticists. In ROS, gazebo and Rviz are used for  visual and physics simulation but there’s always room for a better simulation. This took 4 years but it’s finally here. MORSE (Modular OpenRobots Simulation Engine) is the latest simulation tool available for ROS among other robotics architecture and middleware. It’s the most realistic simulation I have seen and it allows you to take control of how real you want the simulation to be.

It’s based on open source projects like Blender for 3D rendering and Bullet for physics simulation. It’s build on an established workflow and that’s allows the simulation to sit on these two establish platform. It allows single and multi robot simulation and has 20 classes of sensors from cameras, depth sensors to IMUs. It currently supports 4 open source middleware – ROS, YARP, Pocolibs and MOOS.

One interest aspect of MORSE is that it can handle multiple robots in joint simulation scenario and work together in a distributed network of simulation nodes. This is a server-client model and it allows the use of multiple systems to run the simulation smoothly with distributed computing.

Full documentation is available on their site.