CoppeliaSim

Developer(s)	Coppelia Robotics AG

Stable release	4.6 / October 21st, 2023

Operating system	Windows, Linux, macOS
Type	Robotics simulator
License	Dual licensed (commercial or GPL)
Website	Coppelia Robotics web page

CoppeliaSim, formerly known as V-REP, is a robot simulator used in industry, education and research.^[1]^[2] It was originally developed within Toshiba R&D and is currently being actively developed and maintained by Coppelia Robotics AG, a small company located in Zurich, Switzerland.

It is built around a distributed control architecture having Python and Lua scripts, or C/C++ plug-ins acting as individual, synchronous controllers. Additional asynchronous controllers can execute in another process, thread or machine via various middleware solutions (ROS, remote API,^[3] ZeroMQ) with programming languages such as C/C++, Python, Java and Matlab.

CoppeliaSim uses a kinematics engine for forward and inverse kinematics calculations, and several physics simulation libraries (MuJoCo, Bullet, ODE, Vortex, Newton Game Dynamics) to perform rigid body simulation. Models and scenes are built by assembling various objects (meshes, joints, various sensors, Point clouds, OC trees, etc.) into a hierarchical structure. Additional functionality, provided by plug-ins, include: motion planning (via OMPL), synthetic vision and imaging processing (e.g. via OpenCV), collision detection, minimum distance calculation, custom graphical user interfaces and Data visualization (e.g. via plots).

The main fields of application of CoppeliaSim are robotics research^[4] and education.^[5]^[6]^[7]

References

^ Rohmer, Eric; Singh, Surya P. N.; Freese, Marc (3 November 2013). CoppeliaSim (formerly V-REP): a Versatile and Scalable Robot Simulation Framework (PDF). 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Tokyo, Japan. pp. 1321–1326. doi:10.1109/IROS.2013.6696520.
^ "CoppeliaSim / V-REP paper references". Retrieved 9 September 2020.
^ "Remote API reference". Retrieved 26 April 2021.
^ Jiménez, A.; Anzola, J.; Rubén González Crespo, Vicente García-Díaz; L., Zhao (2020). "PyDSLRep: A domain-specific language for robotic simulation in V-Rep". PLOS ONE. 15 (7): e0235271. Bibcode:2020PLoSO..1535271J. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0235271. PMC 7329094. PMID 32609761.
^ Caio, Camargo; Gonçalves, José; Conde, Miguel Á.; Rodríguez-Sedano, Francisco J.; Costa, Paulo; García-Peñalvo, Francisco J. (2021). "Systematic Literature Review of Realistic Simulators Applied in Educational Robotics Context". Sensors. 21 (12): 4031. doi:10.3390/s21124031. PMC 8230607. PMID 34208046.
^ "CoppeliaSim Introduction - Northwestern Mechatronics Wiki". hades.mech.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2021-04-22.
^ Pitonakova, Lenka; Giuliani, Manuel; Pipe, Anthony; Winfield, Alan (2018). Giuliani, Manuel; Assaf, Tareq; Giannaccini, Maria Elena (eds.). Feature and Performance Comparison of the V-REP, Gazebo and ARGoS Robot Simulators. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer International Publishing. pp. 357–368. ISBN 978-3-319-96728-8.