Mesh optimization for "fast" simulation

edit

Partial answer here. My impression is that the number of contacts, not mesh geometry, is one of the largest bottlenecks in simulation.

It may be worth your time to experiment with different maxContacts values in your *.urdf/xacro, e.g:

<gazebo reference="LINK_NAME" >
  <maxContacts="NUMBER_OF_CONTACTS"/>
</gazebo>

Hi, I personally noticed a significant improvement by using cylindrical primitives to approximate the robot links. Be careful, in this case you will have to manually place the reference systems and decide the dimensions so that these collision meshes overlap perfectly or with a small margin with the visual meshes of your robot.

Primitives are one way, otherwise if you want to test it faster I would recommend using the convex hull method to approximate your meshes with simpler geometry and fewer faces.

See here: link text