Robotics Simulator
Which is the best robotics simulator ? As of now, I am just looking to get simple simulations of Potential Field method, Bug Algorithms, A* Algorithm etc !
A list of the known robot simulators are;
- Player Project (2D simulator - Stage - 3D simulator - Gazebo - and control interface - open source, part of the ROS project)
- MORSE (general purpose indoor/outdoor 3D simulator)
- Microsoft Robotics Studio (simulator + control interface)
- KiKS (Matlab plugin, only for Khepera + control interface)
- MobotSim (for point like robots, more of algorithm implementation )
- Karel (Pretty Kiddish, I guess it is Pascal/Logo like)
- MRPT (looks very nice, will try it soon)
- Carmen (Robot Vision etc is easy to implement in it (?))
- Webots (open-source - multiplatform - multilanguage [ROS, Python, Matlab, etc.] - state-of-the-art appearance - web export)
- Simbad (2D/3D simulator in Java and Jython)
- Robocode (A Java/ .NET suit)
- Rossum's Playhouse (C/C++ suit)
- V-REP (3D, source available, Lua scripting, APIs for C/C++, Python, Java, Matlab, URBI, 2 physics engines, full kinematic solver, etc.)
Some more generic platforms/middlewares also offer simulation tools:
- ROS (currently the largest integration of such platforms)
- URBI
- YARP
- OROCOS (Don't know anything about it !)
Some references on robot simulators :
Answer
I would go for a commonly used framework. As you are interested in path planning, pick a framework that already has simulated robots, and just write the planning services you need to generate paths for it.
ROS is very cool, and has quite a large selection of useful perception services, as well as the full PR2 stack. It uses gazebo (part of player/stage) for simulation, and includes a few off the shelf robots (erratic would be ideal for this). Its quite new, but very active.
MRDS has several suitable robots, and frankly better simulated environments then ROS, but not quite as much by way of high level services. The lego robot simulator would be fine for what you want to do, and gives you the choice of validating on real hardware cheaply in the future.
These two have the lions share of developers at the moment. Really the decision boils down to whether you are happier developing in visual studio under windows, or on linux platforms. Both are free for students (MSRS is under ELMS / dreamspark programs), both have a learning curve, both have pretty good community support. For MRDS, go sign up to the forum, for ROS, join the mailing list.