Cyberbotics›Cyberbotics› offers Webots

Webots is distributed free of charge under a permissive open-source licence, which removes procurement barriers for universities, research groups and industrial teams that need to validate control and AI algorithms without physical hardware. Its bundled model library and cross-platform desktop distribution let teams begin simulating without assembling a separate toolchain.

Continuity is a practical advantage: the simulator has been maintained since 1998 with documented backward compatibility between major versions, a published API reference and human quality-assurance testing on each release. Integration packages connect it to the ROS and ROS 2 frameworks, and simulations can run headless in continuous-integration pipelines or stream to a browser through webots.cloud.

Webots began as a research tool at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and was commercialised by Cyberbotics, the EPFL spin-off founded in 1998 that has maintained the simulator continuously since that year.

The project moved to an open-source distribution model in December 2018, releasing the simulator under a permissive licence while the company continued development funded by user support, training and consulting services. Later releases added ROS 2 integration, cloud-hosted simulation sharing through webots.cloud, and browser-based competition hosting such as Robotbenchmark.

Demand for robotics simulation tracks growth in robotics research, industrial automation and robotics education, where virtual testing lowers the cost of developing and validating controller software before physical deployment. Open-source simulators compete mainly on physics fidelity, sensor realism, framework integration and repeatability rather than on licence price.

Webots is positioned in that market as a free desktop simulator paired with paid support and consulting services, with adjacent cloud and education offerings through webots.cloud and browser-based competition platforms. Its standing depends on continued integration with mainstream robotics frameworks and on retaining the education and research audience as browser-hosted simulation platforms expand.

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 for industry, education and research use.

Robots are programmed in C, C++, Python, Java, MATLAB or ROS, and simulations can be exported as movies, interactive HTML scenes or animations. Webots ships a library of robots, sensors, actuators, objects and materials, imports CAD models from Blender and URDF, and pairs with the webots.cloud service for sharing models and running competitions.