Simulate your turtlebot in Gazebo

Getting Gazebo up-and-running is described well on the ROS wiki. Here is a short summary.


Step 1: install turtlebot simulator
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-turtlebot-simulator

Step 2: start gazebo
roslaunch turtlebot_gazebo turtlebot_world.launch


Step 3: start rviz
roslaunch turtlebot_rviz_launchers view_robot.launch


Step 4: launch your other nodes 
For example you can launch the teleop to control your turtlebot and drive it around in the simulator using:
roslaunch turtlebot_teleop keyboard_teleop.launch

Note on world files:
Gazebo can be launched with the world file as parameter.
they can be relative to the existing path, an absolute path or be located in /usr/share/gazebo-<version>/
a subfolder /worlds actually contains a few interesting ones

Stability
Gazebo is not the most stable product. ROS indigo comes with version 2. ROS jade comes with version 5. While ROS jade is available at the time of writing this post, the Turtlebot packages are not. I am axiously looking out for the Turtlebot packages for ROS jade so that I can see if Gazebo indeed deliveres the expected stability improvement.

Gazebo started ok on my machine but gave segmentation faults (exit code 139) later on. I found that this could be due to URDF parsing problems. The following line solved that for me:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

Extra models in Gazebo
You can add extra elements to the Gazebo world. Gazebo has an option to import models from an online repository. You can also download this repository locally using :
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models