Congratulations on making it through to the end of the section.
In this section, we took a look at ignition gazebo as a possible tool for simulating your robotic systems.
That's because Gazebo has been historically paired with ROS.
And most common when first getting into robotic simulations which use Ros Ignition gazebo is a relatively
new framework, only really being released in 2022 and missing some features which Gazebo Classic had.
Now there are a number of reasons for this, and I only expect ignition gazebo features and documentation
to improve over time.
But keep in mind there are additional simulation tools to be used depending on your use case.
A lot of my students who take this course are interested in robotic arms.
These robots are common around many manufacturing workplaces and all involve similar types of problem
solving, such as path planning, manipulator control and task planning.
This type of specialty robotics can benefit from specialty frameworks such as Move It, a common framework
tool used with ROS to easily combine features such as motion planning, inverse kinematics, 3D perception
and various controllers.
They recently released their ROS to humble release, so feel free to check that out to see what they
have to offer if that seems interesting to you.
Besides specialty frameworks like Move It.
There are complete simulation alternatives out there.
One of which seems to be catching traction in the Ross community is Reebok's.
One of its biggest selling points is being a simplistic simulation tool, not strictly tied to a framework
such as ROS, which can be used for general use simulations while also having a decent amount of example
simulations to leapfrog off of.
We bought does have a Ross driver, so you can both use the simulation to create robotic models and
control them over Ross all without having to mess with any SDF files and seemingly have very good cross
operating system support.
Another popular simulation platform in the field of robotics and academia, as well as research and
development, is Moukoko, which stands for Multi Joint Dynamics with Contact.
This platform was acquired and made open source by DeepMind.
Again, this is a good pick for robotics applications which need accurate multi body contact dynamics.
But hands down one of the major simulations I am eyeing down as the potential winner takes all candidate
for the future of robotics simulations is Nvidia's Isaac SIM.
The future of robotics is the advancements of its software capabilities through AI and machine learning,
and Isaacson was built with that in mind.
Previous GTC conferences hosted by NVIDIA showed a promising advances in truly bridging the gap from
simulation to reality through the work of several research institutions operating on the animal platform.
A quadruped robot similar to Boston Dynamics spot robot but with wheels for feet.
Leveraging their graphics card supremacy, Nvidia was able to create simulation environments capable
of generating realistic synthetic data for robot model training as well as their Isaac Jim framework,
which allows for reinforcement learning training in extremely high capacities within simulation in parallel.
Nvidia omniverse, which is the base platform Isaac runs off of, also has connectors to various popular
CAD softwares, which will really help bridge the gap between updating mechanical designs in a way which
update directly to your simulations and to top the cake.
You can also use this tool leveraging Nvidia's online data centers to quickly train your robot models
in the cloud on super computer level systems, taking training time down significantly.
Now, of course this comes quite the monetary cost, but nonetheless, being able to easily expand compute
capabilities to anyone is a great way to expedite robotic innovations to those trying out new things.
There's so much happening in the world of robotics and there are many tools and simulation frameworks
that I fail to cover.
But hopefully you can see why robotics is growing at a rapid pace and the tools we are using are evolving
every day.
So Cognition Gazebo is a great place to start your journey in general purpose robotics simulation.
But based on whatever your project objectives are, there may be other tools and frameworks out there
for you to use which can expedite your progress.
So hopefully I covered at least enough of them in this video as a reference point to help you understand
what's out there.