Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: Olivier Michel <olivier.mic...@cyberbotics.com>
* Package name : webots Version : R2019b Upstream Author : Olivier Michel <olivier.mic...@cyberbotics.com> * URL : https://github.com/omichel/webots * License : Apache 2.0 Programming Lang: C++ Description : Webots is robot simulator providing a complete development environment to model, program and simulate robots, vehicles and biomechanical systems. Webots is an open-source robot simulator. It is widely used in industry, education and research. The Webots project started in 1996, initially developed by Dr. Olivier Michel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since December 2018, it is released under the Apache 2 license. Webots uses a fork of the ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) for detecting of collisions and simulating rigid body dynamics. The ODE library allows one to accurately simulate physical properties of objects such as velocity, inertia and friction. A large collection of freely modifiable robot models comes in the software distribution. In addition, it is also possible to build new models from scratch. When designing a robot model, the user specifies both the graphical and the physical properties of the objects. The graphical properties include the shape, dimensions, position and orientation, colors, and texture of the object. The physical properties include the mass, friction factor, as well as the spring and damping constants. Simple fluid dynamics is present in the software. Webots includes a set of sensors and actuators frequently used in robotic experiments, e.g. proximity sensors, light sensors, touch sensors, GPS, accelerometers, cameras, emitters and receivers, servo motors (rotational & linear), position and force sensor, LEDs, grippers, gyros, compass, etc. The robot controller programs can be written in C, C++, Python, ROS, Java and MATLAB using a simple API. Webots offers the possibility to take PNG screen shots and to record the simulations as MPEG (Mac/Linux) and AVI (Windows) movies. Webots worlds are stored in cross-platform .wbt files which format is based on the VRML language. It is also possible to import and export Webots worlds or objects in the VRML format. Another useful feature is that the user can interact with a running simulation at any time, i.e., it is possible to move the robots and other object with the mouse. Webots can stream a simulation on web browsers using WebGL. Webots is used in several online robot programming competitions including https://robotbenchmark.net This package is useful as it is often recognized as the best tool for simulating mobile robots. It is used by thousands of research labs worldwide in both academia and industry. Another package providing a similar functionality is Gazebo. Comparing to Gazebo, Webots is easier-to-use and more powerful on a large number of features: 3D rendering, sensor modeling, physics simulation acuracy, transfer to real robots, etc. We plan to maintain it on the long term as we are receiving European funding for that purpose. We do not need co-maintenainers, we would welcome volunteer :). We need a sponsor to get into debian.
