Do you want to learn robot, but you don’t have money to buy the robot? Or you don’t know where to start?
Webots simulator is the solution! You can learn with any kind of robots and environments easily. Also you can create your custom robots and environment. The most interesting is Webots is free and open source.
Here we will discuss about Webots, and create our first robot program to make it move. The robot program is implemented to e-puck robot.
My Experience using Webots
I have used Webots to help my friend in her thesis to develop obstacle avoidance algorithms in Niching Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms for multi-target search multi-robot system. Robots is locate in a search area. Then the robots move to search for a targets. With Niching Particle Swarm Optimization, robots is sharing their best location related to possible target location, so robots can find the best possible target location. In this simulation, we used 40 robots, and 4 targets.
My experience in developing this project using Webots is it’s very easy to learn and use, complete tools, and realistic. Also I don’t need to spend any money to buy real robots.
I will discuss about this project soon.
Webots: Robot Simulator
Webots is an open source robot simulator that provides a complete development environment to model, program and simulate robots. Thousands of institutions worldwide use it for R&D and teaching. Webots has been codeveloped by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, thoroughly tested, well documented and continuously maintained since 1996. It is the most efficient solution to quickly get professional results. [Reference]
What Can I Do with Webots?
- Develop custom robots or using available robot
- Develop custom 3D environment (ground, obstacle, object, sky, physics behavior)
- Create your robots logic
- Simulate and testing
- Record or Screenshot your simulation
Webots Research Area
- Many mobile robotics projects have relied on Webots for years in the following areas:
- Mobile robot prototyping (academic research, the automotive industry, aeronautics, the vacuum cleaner industry, the toy industry, hobbyists, etc.)
- Robot locomotion research (legged, humanoids, quadrupeds robots, etc.)
- Multi-agent research (swarm intelligence, collaborative mobile robots groups, etc.)
- Adaptive behavior research (genetic algorithm, neural networks, AI, etc.).
- Teaching robotics (robotics lectures, C/C++/Java/Python programming lectures, etc.)
- Robot contests (e.g. Robotstadium or Rat’s Life)
Webots Simulation
- A Webots simulation is composed of following items:
- A Webots world file (.wbt) that defines one or several robots and their environment.
- The .wbt file does sometimes depend on external PROTO files (.proto) and textures.
- One or several controller programs for the above robots (in C/C++/Java/Python/MATLAB).
- An optional physics plugin that can be used to modify Webots regular physics behavior (in C/C++)
Available robots
- Webots have many kinds of available robot, for example:
- e-puck (two-wheeled robot)
- Parallax Boe-Bot (three-wheeled robot)
- Four-wheeled robot
- Hexapod robot
- Robotics armSmall size car-like robot
- Humanoid robot
- Dog-like robot
Programming Language
You can write the webots robot controller using C++, Java, Python or MATLAB. Choose any kind of your favourite programming language.
#robots #webots #e-puck #c-language #c++ #cplusplus
