[paper] Simulation Tools for Model-Based Robotics

[ratatouille]

Hi, I came across this recent paper, which might be interesting for the Bullet community.

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov ... ICRA15.pdf

Simulation Tools for Model-Based Robotics: Comparison of Bullet, Havok, MuJoCo, ODE and PhysX
Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa and Emanuel Todorov

Abstract— There is growing need for software tools that can
accurately simulate the complex dynamics of modern robots.
While a number of candidates exist, the field is fragmented.
It is difficult to select the best tool for a given project, or
to predict how much effort will be needed and what the
ultimate simulation performance will be. Here we introduce
new quantitative measures of simulation performance, focusing
on the numerical challenges that are typical for robotics as
opposed to multi-body dynamics and gaming. We then present
extensive simulation results, obtained within a new software
framework for instantiating the same model in multiple engines
and running side-by-side comparisons. Overall we find that
each engine performs best on the type of system it was designed
and optimized for: MuJoCo wins the robotics-related tests,
while the gaming engines win the gaming-related tests without
a clear leader among them. The simulations are illustrated in
the accompanying movie.