1. What is ODE

A humanoid robot powered by ODE

This is the first ODE tutorial. Thank you for visiting demura.net.

ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) , an open source physics engine, has been developing by Russell Smith since 2001. A simulator, like an above figure, can relatively easy to be created. Our RoboCup team,  team WinKIT,  has been using ODE to create a RoboCup simulator.

This tutorials are composed of 15 lessons. First, describes features of ODE, next install ODE and a development environment, …,  finally, make a simple interactive simulator.

Major features are listed as follows,

• Free: Open-source license for the GNU LGPL and BSD to become a favorite of license to be used (for details, see here,). In a commercial-free can be used. Of course, the teaching and use of personal taste is the best.
• Easy to use:  A simple 3D graphics engine, drawstuff, is attach to ODE. So, you can use ODE without installing other graphics engines. The collision detection is also build in ODE. As well as documentations and demo programs are also plentiful. In addition, the ODE community is very acitive, mailing lists can also be read on the website.
• Fast: as well as a commercial game engine is used as a fast speed. Research of genetic algorithms and  reinforcement learning is suitable. Society of robots in this year’s project, many researchers have used for simulation.
• Multi-platform: ODE can be used in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Softwares work only on Windows are not suitable for education.
• C  and  C++  language can be used.

Next time, let’s install ODE and the development environment.