Webots robot simulator went open-source | Hacker News Reader

Webots robot simulator went open-source

github.com

89 pointslukicdarkoo6 comments

If you are unfamiliar - Webots is a fantastic robotics simulation platform. Originally developed at EPFL in Switzerland and then as commercial software by Cyberbotics - its now* available under the Apache 2 license (with commercial support available from the Cyberbotics team).

*edit - Webots went open source with the 2019 release. see: https://www.cyberbotics.com/doc/blog/Webots-2019-a-release

It ships with a good collection of modifiable models including full robots as well as multiple sensors, actuators etc. Its is also simple to build and add your own robot models or integrate with other simulators. Controller programs can be written in C, C++, Python, ROS, Java or MATLAB via an easy to use API. Hopefully the open source edition will drive increased adoption.

Learn more here: https://www.cyberbotics.com/ and parent discussion link goes to the github source code.

Better Open AI gyms at last.

There is OpenAI gym interface for Webots: https://github.com/aidudezzz/deepbots

The interface simplifies usage of Reinforcement Learning algorithms with Webots.

How does it compare to Gazebo? See https://lenkaspace.net/tutorials/programming/robotSimulators... for the most recent comparison of sim environments for robotics.

There is an article about performance comparison and Webots is way ahead of the competition: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.04627.pdf

There is a Wikipedia article comparing different robotics simulators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics_simulator

You may find a podcast with Olivier (CEO of Cyberbotics) interesting as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy75VfUg9II

Interesting. I just got openrave working on my machine this weekend. As someone completely new to the realm of robot simulation it's nice to see this on the front page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com