CoppeliaSim

CoppeliaSim, formerly known as V-REP, is a robot simulator used in industry, education and research. It was originally developed within Toshiba R&D and is currently being actively developed and maintained by Coppelia Robotics AG, a small company located in Zurich, Switzerland. [Wikipedia]

• Website_
• Documentation

Installation

Download the software from the official website_.

.. tabbed:: Linux

For Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) use the following commands:

```bash
tar vxf CoppeliaSim_Edu_V4_3_0_Ubuntu20_04.tar.xz
```
Then move it to the ``/opt`` folder (its your choice thought):

```bash
sudo mv CoppeliaSim_Edu_V4_3_0_Ubuntu20_04/ /opt/coppeliasim
```
Then, to start the program simple run:

```bash
cd /opt/coppeliasim
./coppeliaSim.sh
```

.. tabbed:: Windows

Figure it out yourself.

.. tabbed:: Mac-OS

Figure it out yourself.

ROS2 Integration

CoppeliaSim comes with a plugin that is acting like an interface to communicate with ROS. This later is located in the installation folder with the name libsimExtROS2.so. You can equally compile this plugin from source if it is necessary. Follow the instructions from here.

When the program starts, have a look in the terminal to verify that the plugin has been correctly loaded:

[CoppeliaSim:loadinfo]   plugin 'ROS2': loading...
[CoppeliaSim:loadinfo]   plugin 'ROS2': load succeeded.

You should have a ROS node started that looks like this:

$ ros2 node list
/sim_ros2_interface

There is a ROS2 tutorial in the official documentation that is worth following to learn more.