Gazebo supports 4 physics engines. How do I find out which one of these four my compilation is using?
I would be pleased if you can help me out.
Kind regards Andi
Originally posted by nerdOmat on Gazebo Answers with karma: 1 on 2014-01-31
Post score: 0
The Gazebo debians currently only have support for ODE (I'll explain why at the end of this post if you're interested). In order to use Bullet, Simbody, and/or Dart, you must install those physics engines and then build Gazebo from source. You can view the cmake messages to see which physics engines it found. You can also use the ldd tool on linux to see which physics libraries your gazebo build is linked with.
To see the libraries:
# This is what it looks like when you have all 4 physics engines
$ ldd `which gzserver` | grep libgazebo_physics
libgazebo_physics.so.3 => /home/scpeters/ws/gazebo_sdformat/devel_isolated/gazebo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgazebo_physics.so.3 (0x00007ff3ec986000)
libgazebo_physics_ode.so.3 => /home/scpeters/ws/gazebo_sdformat/devel_isolated/gazebo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgazebo_physics_ode.so.3 (0x00007ff3e7460000)
libgazebo_physics_bullet.so.3 => /home/scpeters/ws/gazebo_sdformat/devel_isolated/gazebo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgazebo_physics_bullet.so.3 (0x00007ff3e71c0000)
libgazebo_physics_dart.so.3 => /home/scpeters/ws/gazebo_sdformat/devel_isolated/gazebo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgazebo_physics_dart.so.3 (0x00007ff3e6f31000)
libgazebo_physics_simbody.so.3 => /home/scpeters/ws/gazebo_sdformat/devel_isolated/gazebo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgazebo_physics_simbody.so.3 (0x00007ff3e6c8d000)
To use a specific physics engine, use the -e argument (ode is the default).
For example:
gazebo -e bullet gazebo -e dart gazebo -e ode gazebo -e simbody
The reason that the gazebo deb does not depend on any other physics engines is due to versioning and availability in the Ubuntu repositories. Simbody and Dart are not yet in Debian or Ubuntu (though Simbody may be in soon), so the Gazebo deb cannot depend on them. Bullet is in Ubuntu, but the current Ubuntu version is 2.80, while gazebo 1.9 requires bullet 2.81 and gazebo 2 requires bullet 2.82.
Originally posted by scpeters with karma: 2861 on 2014-01-31
This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site
Post score: 6
Comment by xanderai on 2016-03-30:
Note that as of March 2016, Bullet and Simbody are distributed as part of the Gazebo 6 Ubuntu package