  Simulation software is a powerful tool for robotics research, allowing the
virtual representation of the real world. However with the rise of the Robot
Operating System (ROS), there are new simulation software packages that have
not been compared within the literature. This paper proposes a systematic
review of simulation software that are compatible with ROS version 2. The focus
is research in robotics arm manipulation as it represents the most often used
robotic application in industry and their future applicability to digital
twins. For this, we thus benchmark simulation software under similar
parameters, tasks and scenarios, and evaluate them in terms of their capability
for long-term operations, success at completing a task, repeatability and
resource usage. We find that there is no best simulation software overall, but
two simulation packages (Ignition and Webots) have higher stability than other
while, in terms of resources usage, PyBullet and Coppeliasim consume less than
their competitors.
