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In this guide, you’ll build a complete pick-and-place robot simulation from scratch using Drift. By the end, you’ll have a robot arm on a table picking up objects in Gazebo Sim.
Make sure you’ve completed the Quickstart setup before starting.

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Step 1: Start Drift

Open your terminal (or the integrated terminal in VS Code or Cursor) and launch Drift: 
drift
You’ll see the Drift welcome screen with the interactive drift> prompt.

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Step 2: Create the Robot

Tell Drift what robot you want: 
create a pick-and-place robot simulation
Drift will plan and execute the following:
  • Create a ROS2 workspace
  • Generate the URDF for a manipulator arm with a gripper
  • Set up the necessary ROS2 packages
  • Create a Gazebo world with a table, pick objects, and target markers
  • Generate launch files
  • Build the entire workspace
Watch the output as Drift works through each step. If any step fails (e.g., a missing dependency), the Agent will attempt to fix it automatically.

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Step 3: Launch the Simulation

Once the build completes, launch everything: 
launch my robot in Gazebo
Gazebo Sim will open showing your simulation environment. You should see:
  • A ground plane as the floor surface
  • A table as the workspace
  • Pick objects (boxes or cylinders) on the table
  • A target marker showing the goal position
  • Your robot arm ready to operate
3-joint manipulator arm rendered in RViz with Joint State Publisher sliders

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Step 4: Explore the Environment

With the simulation running, you can inspect what’s happening: 
what topics are being published?
/ps
The /ps command shows all running processes — your ROS2 nodes, the Gazebo instance, and any controllers.

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Step 5: Add a Sensor

Let’s add a camera to the robot so it can see what it’s picking up: 
add a camera sensor to my robot and rebuild
Drift will:
  1. Update the URDF with the camera link and joint
  2. Configure the Gazebo camera plugin
  3. Rebuild the workspace
  4. Relaunch the simulation

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Step 6: Debug an Issue

If something isn’t working — say the camera isn’t publishing images — ask Drift: 
why isn't my camera publishing images?
The Agent will check the ROS2 topic list, inspect the sensor configuration, and give you a diagnosis with a suggested fix.

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Step 7: Iterate

This is where Drift shines. Keep building on what you have: 
add a lidar sensor to the base
add more objects to the table
change the gripper to a suction cup
increase the arm reach
Each change triggers only the necessary rebuilds. You don’t have to restart from scratch.

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What You Built

By the end of this guide, you’ve created:
  • A complete ROS2 workspace with packages
  • A robot arm described in URDF with sensors
  • A Gazebo world with objects and a table
  • Launch files that tie everything together
  • A running simulation you can iterate on
All through natural language prompts — no manual URDF editing, no hand-written launch files, no Gazebo XML.

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Next Steps

Manipulator in RViz

Simulate a 3 joints robot arm and visualize it in RViz

Commands Reference

Full list of Drift CLI commands and slash commands