Best Free Robot Simulation Software

Cyberbotics' Webots is an open source, multi-platform desktop application designed for modeling, programming, and simulating robots. It offers a comprehensive development environment that includes a vast asset library with robots, sensors, actuators, objects, and materials, facilitating rapid prototyping and efficient robotics project development. Users can import existing CAD models from tools like Blender or URDF and integrate OpenStreetMap data to create detailed simulations. Webots supports programming in multiple languages, including C, C++, Python, Java, MATLAB, and ROS, providing flexibility for diverse development needs. Its modern GUI, combined with a physics engine and OpenGL rendering, enables realistic simulation of various robotic systems, such as wheeled robots, industrial arms, legged robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles. The platform is widely utilized in industry, education, and research for tasks like robot prototyping, and AI algorithm development.

CoppeliaSim, developed by Coppelia Robotics, is a versatile and powerful robot simulation platform utilized for rapid algorithm development, factory automation simulations, fast prototyping and verification, robotics education, remote monitoring, safety double-checking, and digital twin creation. It features a distributed control architecture, allowing each object or model to be individually controlled via embedded scripts (Python or Lua), plugins (C/C++), remote API clients (Python, Lua, Java, MATLAB, Octave, C, C++, Rust), or custom solutions. The simulator supports five physics engines, MuJoCo, Bullet Physics, ODE, Newton, and Vortex Dynamics, for fast and customizable dynamics calculations, enabling realistic simulation of real-world physics and object interactions, including collision response, grasping, soft bodies, strings, ropes, and cloths. CoppeliaSim provides forward and inverse kinematics calculations for any type of mechanism.