Simulation · Simulation & Digital Twins
v1.0.0
World Collection is an open-source set of 42 simulation worlds for Gazebo Harmonic (gz-sim), intended for testing autonomous exploration, navigation and SLAM of mobile robots. The worlds are plain SDF files with no robot inside, so they work with any robot and any software stack.
The collection is grouped by purpose: ten small single-challenge worlds (SC), each isolating one problem (narrow passage, dead ends, a loop, clutter, open space); two pilot worlds (P) for parameter tuning; twenty-five worlds from five procedurally generated families (F: mazes, offices, warehouse aisles, forests and city blocks) that vary size, number of rooms, doors or density in a controlled way; three worlds based on real places (RP); and two worlds with moving obstacles (MO) whose motion depends only on simulation time.
Every world has fixed start poses and measured layout values (free area, narrowest passage, loops, dead ends and visibility descriptors), so methods can be compared fairly. The worlds are defined and generated by an included Python package (worldgen) that checks each world and rebuilds it to identical files (SDF 1.9 for Gazebo Harmonic / gz-sim 8). The two moving-object worlds use a small Gazebo system plugin written in C++.
The set was created for the exploration benchmark of the frontier_exploration_ros2 package, but none of the worlds depend on it. It is authored by Mert Güler (Yıldız Technical University); the project is developed as open source under the Apache 2.0 license and published with a DOI on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.23460686).
Simulation software is used for modelling, testing, and validating robot behaviours, sensor characteristics, environments, and algorithms without requiring physical hardware. It enables safe, repeatable, and cost-effective development cycles. Common robotics simulators include Gazebo, Isaac Sim (NVIDIA), MuJoCo, PyBullet, and Webots, each offering different trade-offs between physics accuracy, rendering fidelity, and integration with middleware frameworks such as ROS 2.
A benchmark / evaluation harness is software that provides a standardized test environment: it defines tasks, collects measurements, records traces, and enables reproducible comparison of models or systems. It typically includes a control layer (running attempts), a results recorder, and metrics with a leaderboard.
The simulation role describes software that reproduces the physical behavior of a robot and its environment in a computer environment. The simulation component implements: deterministic integration of rigid-body and soft-body dynamics (typically via PhysX, Bullet, MuJoCo, Newton engines), photo-realistic scene rendering (RTX, ray-tracing), sensor models (RGB/D cameras, LiDAR, IMU, F/T), synthetic data generation for training machine learning policies, comparative evaluation of multiple solution variants under identical conditions. Simulation enables massively parallel RL training without physical hardware and is the foundation of the sim-to-real workflow.
The benchmarking and evaluation role describes software responsible for standardized measurement of robot and AI model capabilities. The benchmark component includes: a set of defined tasks (manipulation, locomotion, perception, instruction), automated success and execution quality metrics, test scenarios covering generalization dimensions (lighting, background, camera noise, control delay), reproducible processes for running multiple trials with result aggregation, model leaderboards (e.g. π0.5, GR00T, π0). Modern systems use VLM (Vision-Language Models) for auto-evaluation of complex qualitative criteria inaccessible to simple numerical metrics.
Used as the simulation world set for the exploration benchmark of the frontier_exploration_ros2 package (autonomous-exploration-demo-benchmark).
15 GitHub stars (October 2026); published with a DOI on Zenodo.
A family of open-source operating systems based on the Linux kernel, common on servers, in the cloud and in robotics.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 'Noble Numbat' — supported until April 2029. The host for ROS 2 Jazzy.
License family: Permissive
First release: 42 Gazebo Harmonic worlds (SC, P, generated F families, RP and MO), the worldgen generator package and the moving-objects plugin.
