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Cyberbotics
Cyberbotics is a Swiss robotics simulation company in Gollion that develops the open-source Webots robot simulator.
Founded
1998Cyberbotics is a Swiss robotics simulation company in Gollion that develops the open-source Webots robot simulator.
Webots is an open-source, multi-platform desktop application used to model, program and simulate robots. It combines a Qt user interface, an ODE-derived physics engine and an OpenGL rendering engine, and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.
Robots can be programmed in C, C++, Python, Java, MATLAB and ROS, and simulations can be exported as movies, interactive HTML scenes or animations, or streamed to a web browser. Cyberbotics also maintains an asset library of robots, sensors, actuators and environments, and the webots.cloud service for sharing models and running competitions.
Demand for robotics simulation follows growth in robotics research, industrial automation and robotics education, where simulation reduces the cost of developing and validating controller software against physical hardware. Open-source simulators compete on physics fidelity, sensor realism and framework integration rather than on licence price.
Cyberbotics addresses that market through a free core simulator combined with paid user-support plans and custom development services. Its position depends on continued integration with mainstream robotics frameworks and on the education segment, where browser-based and installation-free simulation platforms are expanding the available audience.
Webots is distributed free of charge under a permissive open-source licence, which lowers adoption barriers for universities, research laboratories and industrial teams that need to validate control and AI algorithms without physical hardware. Its bundled model library and cross-platform desktop distribution allow users to begin simulating without assembling a separate toolchain.
Longevity is a practical advantage: the simulator has been maintained continuously since 1998 with documented backward compatibility between major versions and a published API reference. Integration packages connect Webots to the ROS and ROS 2 robotics frameworks, and the webots.cloud platform lets shared simulations and programming competitions run in a web browser.