Open Access

For many years simulations are an important tool for researchers in many fields of application. With ongoing improvements in computing power and the rising requirements in the industry, simulation software has to shift the focus more towards industrial use cases. Especially in robotics and machine learning applications, the physical behavior has to be reproduced as realistic as possible to avoid unwanted collisions during runtime. In general, applications such as mounting or bin picking with an automated robot shall be evaluated. Therefore this paper investigates three in-use and one newly published software environment with included physics engine for realistic simulations that are commercially available. For comparison, a benchmark with collisions between two gears to imitate a mounting process is implemented and key features are defined. Only two of the simulation software manage to pass the benchmark. Despite that, both of them show restrictions revealing a lack of reliable software for realistic robot interaction simulation.