Help to get started with Robot Simulation

Gazebo can work in parallel with ROS (Robot Operating System) stack, and I think You should use it to achieve Your objectives.

There are lots of good ROS resources around, but I think You can start with these two.

ROS courses page

http://wiki.ros.org/Courses

And You can also take a look at this company page

https://www.theconstructsim.com/

They used to have some nice (and free) ROS tutorials