In the next article we are going to take a look at Webots. This is a free and open source 3D robot simulator for Gnu / Linux, MacOS and Windows. This software for simulating mobile robots is often used for educational purposes. The Webots project was started in 1996 by Dr. Oliver Michel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL in Lausanne. One of its main advantages is that it allows the user to interact with the model during simulation. The program is based on the Open Dynamics Engine physics engine and the OpenGL rendering engine. It is released under the Apache 2.0 license.
With this software, users can model, program and simulate industrial weapons, bipeds, aerospace vehicles, multi-legged robots, modular robots, cars, flying drones, autonomous underwater vehicles and all kinds of robots. We can find examples of robots, sensors, asset library of objects and materials for easy design. As well we will have the possibility to import our CAD models from Blender and URDF.
Webots uses ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) for collision detection and rigid body dynamic simulation. The ODE library allows you to simulate the physics of objects. This program also allows to build robots through the geometric and dynamic definition of the parts that compose it. It also allows you to specify colors and textures for a better visualization.
This software also includes a number of sensors and actuators frequently used in robotics, with their respective dynamic models. What's more the robot control can be written in C, C ++, Java, Python, Matlab and ROS.
General features of Webots
- The program is multi platform. It runs on Gnu / Linux, Windows, and macOS.
- We will have the possibility to select the Spanish language in the program interface.
- We will be able create prototypes pretty quickly.
- The program will give us the possibility to create a wide variety of simulations.
- Webots saves the models to a .wbt file. These files are based on the language VRML.
- The core of Webots is based on the combination of a Modern GUI (Qt), A physics engine (ODE branch) and a OpenGL 3.3 rendering engine (were).
- Possible export .wbt models to VRML or X3D.
- Webots simulations can be exported like movies, interactive HTML scenes, animations or even streamed to any web browser using webgl and websockets.
- Webots offers the possibility of taking 'screen shots' in PNG or JPEG format and record simulations in MP4 format (macOS / Linux) or AVI (Windows).
- The robot can be programmed in C, C ++, Python, Java, MATLAB or ROS with a simple API covering all basic robotics needs.
- The creators of this software make available to users the basic fundamentals in the tutorials offered in the documentation.
- We can download examples simple that are working from the first moment to use them as a guide.
- We will also find the User's guide from Webots and the Reference Manual for comprehensive documentation, including the Webots nodes and the APIs to control them.
Install Webots 3D Robot Simulator on Ubuntu
Minimum requirements
Using this software needs certain requirements, as they are:
- 2 GHz dual-core CPU clock speed.
- 2 GB of RAM.
- NVIDIA or AMD OpenGL compliant graphics adapter (minimum version 3.3) with at least 512MB of RAM.
Via package .deb
We will be able download Webots in .deb file format from the project GitHub page. The name of the downloaded file for this article is'webots_2020a-rev1_amd64.deb'. The size of the downloaded file is around 1,4 GB.
Once the file is downloaded, we open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and from the folder in which we have saved the file, we can write the following install command:
sudo dpkg -i webots_2020a-rev1_amd64.deb
In case we find dependency problems, we can solve them with the command:
sudo apt install -f
Using PPA
For install this program using its corresponding PPAWe will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and type each of the following commands:
wget -qO- https://cyberbotics.com/Cyberbotics.asc | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://cyberbotics.com/debian/ binary-amd64/'
As I am doing this example in Ubuntu 18.04, it is not necessary to update the available packages, as it is updated automatically. After the update we can install webots with apt typing in the same terminal:
sudo apt install webots
Once the installation is complete, we can find the program launcher on our computer.
Through Snap
If we prefer install Webots using your snap pack We will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write the command in it:
sudo snap install webots
After installation, we can start it by searching for its launcher on the system or by executing this command in the terminal:
webots
It can be obtained more information about this program, its features and documentation that offer users, in the project website.