Simulation has evolved to be a key part of robotics development. Nevertheless, existing simulators such as Gazebo and O3DE tend to be time consuming to set up, computationally heavy and out of the box often simulate systems too idealistically, leading to systems that work in simulation but fail in the real world.

The new ROS 2 package vehicle_dynamics_sim aims to resolve this situation for the specific case of mobile platforms by providing an easy to configure and lightweight vehicle dynamics simulator focused on realistic actuator dynamics. It by default simulates real world imperfections such as dead time and acceleration limits, comes with six vehicle types (four bicycle/Ackermann + differential + omni/mecanum) and is fully configured through a minimum of ROS parameters. The two main use cases are trajectory following controller development and automated validation (CI).

vehicle_dynamics_sim code and documentation