How to disable collisions?

[Senpid Sinclair]

I know that collision detection/avoidance is what bullet is all about but I really just want to use it as a visualizer for robot stuff (like rviz but without ros) because it is very easy to setup.

So far for testing I am just loading robots via the URDF loader and they are going crazy when spawned into each other.

Now my question is: How can I either:
a) globally disable collisions or
b) disable collisions per object?

In another thread I found someone recommending setting a flag `CF_NO_CONTACT_RESPONSE` in the C++ code, but I haven't found that one in the pybullet lib and wouldn't know how to apply this. I was hoping that the URDF loader has this somehow as an optional flag, but not from what I saw.

Thanks so much in advance.

[ardabbour]

You can use visual shapes without collision shapes. For example, your URDF code can be:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<robot name="cube">
  <link name="base_link">

    <collision>
      <geometry>
        <box size="0 0 0"/>
      </geometry>
    </collision>

    <inertial>
      <mass value="0"/>
    	<inertia ixx="0" ixy="0" ixz="0" iyy="0" iyz="0" izz="0"/>
  	</inertial>

    <visual>
      <geometry>
        <box size="1 1 1"/>
      </geometry>
    </visual>

  </link>
</robot>

[Erwin Coumans]

I just implemented a few ways to do it:

Disable collisions per object pair / link:

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enableCollision= 0
pybullet.setCollisionFilterPair(objectUniqueIdA, objectUniqueIdB, linkIndexA, linkIndexB, enableCollision)

or disable collisions per group of objects:

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group = 0#other objects don't collide with me
mask=0 # don't collide with any other object
pybullet. setCollisionFilterGroupMask(objectUniqueId, linkIndex, group, mask)