5.1 Introduction

This chapter describes the capability to add custom physics simulation to your Webots simulations. This is especially useful if you want to model complex forces and torques, such as hydrodynamic forces or a random wind. It is also possible to gather various information (like the position, orientation, linear or angular velocity, etc. of every solid in the world, or the global parameters of the physical simulation), to decide which force or torque should be applied. This way, it is possible to apply hydrodynamic forces only when a robot enters a special part of the world which is supposed to contain water. You may also access internal parameters of the physics engine for a better tuning of your physics simulation. Moreover, you can implement your own collision detection system and define non-uniform friction parameters on some surfaces.

Adding a physics plugin is done by creating a custom shared library which is loaded by Webots at run-time, and which contains function calls to the ODE physics library.

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