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ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3_simulations
Simulations for TurtleBot3
Official Gazebo simulation package for the TurtleBot3, ROBOTIS's popular low-cost educational robot platform. It gives you pre-built worlds, URDF models, and launch files to run navigation, SLAM, and DQN reinforcement learning experiments without physical hardware. The target audience is robotics students and researchers who already own or plan to buy a TurtleBot3.
The fake_node package lets you test ROS2 navigation stacks without Gazebo at all — just a simulated odometry publisher, which is genuinely useful for CI and algorithm development on low-power machines. The DQN stage worlds (four progressively harder obstacle courses) are well thought out for curriculum learning experiments. Active maintenance across both ROS Noetic and ROS2 Humble branches means you're not stuck on a dead distribution. The ros-ci.yml workflow actually builds and lints on push, which is more than most academic robotics repos bother with.
This is a companion package, not a standalone tool — it's useless without the rest of the TurtleBot3 ecosystem (turtlebot3, turtlebot3_msgs, etc.), and getting all those pinned to compatible versions is a recurring pain point in the community. The simulation worlds are simple and purpose-built for the TB3; you can't realistically swap in your own robot model without significant rework. The DQN integration is thin — the launch files set up the environment, but the actual learning code lives in a separate repo (turtlebot3_machine_learning) with its own dependency chain. Documentation lives entirely on the ROBOTIS e-Manual site, so when that goes down or lags behind a ROS release, you're debugging blind.