Real-Time Physics Simulation

Bullet 2.87 has improved support for robotics, reinforcement learning and VR. In particular, see the “Reinforcement Learning” section in the pybullet quickstart guide at http://pybullet.org . There are also preliminary C# bindings to allow the use of pybullet inside Unity 3D for robotics and reinforcement learning. In addition, vectorunit Beach Buggy Racing using Bullet has been released for the Nintendo Switch!

You can download the release from https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3/releases
Here are some videos of some Bullet reinforcement learning environments trained using TensorFlow Agents PPO:

See also KUKA grasping
and pybullet Ant

The Bullet 2.86 has improved Python bindings, pybullet, for robotics, machine learning and VR, see the pybullet quickstart guide.

Furthermore, the PGS LCP constraint solver has a new option to terminate as soon as the residual (error) is below a specified tolerance (instead of terminating after a fixed number of iterations). There is preliminary support to load some MuJoCo MJCF xml files (see data/mjcf), and haptic experiments with a VR glove. Get the latest release from github here.

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We have been making a lot of progress in higher quality physics simulation for robotics, games and visual effects. To make our physics simulation easier to use, especially for roboticist and machine learning experts, we created Python bindings, see examples/pybullet. In addition, we added Virtual Reality support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift using the openvr sdk. See attached youtube movie. Updated documentation will be added soon, as well as possible show-stopper bug-fixes, so the actual release tag may bump up to 2.85.x. Download the release from github here.

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The new Bullet Physics SDK 2.83 is available from github. The biggest change is the new example browser using OpenGL 3+. For more changes and features, see the docs/BulletQuickstart.pdf as part of the release. For more information and download link, see http://www.bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=10527

Also, our proposal for a course on Bullet got accepted for the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2015 conference in Los Angeles.

Tuesday, 11 August 3:45 pm – 5:15 pm, Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 404AB

UPDATE: here are the slide decks:

3:45-4.15 pm
Introduction to rigid body pipeline, collision detection

4:15-4:45 pm
Advances in constraint solving, Featherstone Articulated Body Algorithm

4:45-5.15 pm
Acceleration of the full collision detection and constraint solver on GPU

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 21 scientific and technical achievements represented by 58 individual award recipients will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on Saturday, February 7, at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills.

“To Erwin Coumans for the development of the Bullet physics library, and to Nafees Bin Zafar and Stephen Marshall for the separate development of two large-scale destruction simulation systems based on Bullet.

These pioneering systems demonstrated that large numbers of constrained rigid bodies could be used to animate visually complex, believable destruction effects with minimal simulation time.”

Thanks to all Bullet contributors and users!
See https://www.oscars.org/news/21-scientific-and-technical-achievements-be-honored-academy-awardsr

Nasa is using Bullet in their new open source Tensegrity Robotics Toolkit. You can find more information and video link here: http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9978

The new book Multithreading for Visual Effects includes a chapter on the OpenCL optimizations for upcoming Bullet 3.x. Other chapters include multithreading development experiences from OpenSubDiv, Houdini, Pixar Presto and Dreamworks Fluids and LibEE. You can get it at the publisher AK Peters/CRC Press or at Amazon.

Development on upcoming Bullet 2.83 and Bullet 3.x is making good progress, hopefully an update follows soon.

Development of the open source Bullet Physics SDK continues at http://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3 . All the open issues have been moved from the googlecode repository to github with links between old and new issues. There will be a Bullet 2.83 release using the github repository very soon, it is in alpha stage now. In 2014 we will be moving to Bullet 3.x and the unstable Bullet 3.x code is already included in Bullet 2.83.
Other news is that recently I joined Google to work on the robotics project!

The new Bullet 2.82 SDK is available for download. It allows for higher quality physics simulation, suitable for robotics, using the Featherstone articulated body algorithm. The release also introduces a new Mixed Linear Complementarity Problem (MLCP) solver interface, with various direct solver implementations. Read more here.

Our focus is now on integrating all Bullet 2.x features into the upcoming Bullet 3.x SDK. You can learn more about its progress in our SIGGRAPH course notes on GPU rigid body simulation at the Multithreading and VFX website.

Ralf Knoesel shared the good news that Riptide GP2, the latest iOS/Android game from Vector Unit, uses Bullet for collision detection and rigid body simulation. See http://www.bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=9324 for more information

We have been working with Larry Weinberg and his crew to integrate Bullet soft body and rigid body into Poser 3D. Create rigid simulations with constraints to build complex mechanical interactions. Paint softbody constraint weights to animate. Add jiggle and bounce to any prop or character. Use the Live Simulation mode to preview dynamics in realtime, or calculate simulations to include in rendered animations. See for more information on Bullet and Poser 3D here.

 

 

Bullet 3.x will feature a 100% GPU accelerated rigid body pipeline with various parallel broad phase algorithms, convex and concave triangle mesh and several parallel solvers. Here is a teaser video for my GPU rigid body talk at GDC 2013 this Thursday March 28, 2.30PM. See some Youtube video here.

See http://schedule2013.gdconf.com/session-id/822773 for more details.

The new Bullet 2.81 Physics SDK is released. It includes an Apple contribution of SIMD and Neon optimizations  for Mac OSX and iOS. Some new features include rolling friction ( so that curved shapes such as sphere, cylinders and cones will stop rolling, even on a sloped surface), a gear constraint, force and torque joint feedback, optional Coriolis forces and speculative contacts for fast moving objects. For more information and feedback see 
http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=8490

Bullet 2.80 includes a preview of the GPU rigid body pipeline by Takahiro Harada, running 100% on the GPU using OpenCL. You can check out the Youtube videos or slides and precompiled binaries.
A new AMD Radeon 7970 Tahiti can simulate 110k objects in real-time between 15-30 frames/second. It also works on recent NVIDIA GPUs with latest drivers.

Graham Rhodes and Anthony Hamilton contributed a Android/NEON optimized version of Sony Physics Effects, which will be used as a handheld backend in Bullet 3.x. Last but not least, the open source Dynamica Bullet plugin for Maya is now deterministic and has preliminary support for soft body/cloth and convex decomposition through HACD.

For more info, see this forum post.

The C++ version of Bullet can be build using the Native Client compiler and it runs full-speed in the Google Chrome web browser, without plugin.  Just check your Chrome About Box to make sure the version is 15 or later and you can check out the live demo.

The Bullet C++ source code didn’t need any modification, and it compiled out-of-the-box using the premake4 generated Makefiles. Check out the Native Client for Dummies article for more information.

Bullet 2.79 is out. It is mainly a bugfix release, but there are a few new features. In particular there is a new convex decomposition library, HACD, integrated.  Also we now support the premake build system, next to cmake and autotools. Premake can autogenerated Visual Studio project files that can be distributed, unlike cmake.

See http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7445 for more information.

We uploaded the slides from our SIGGRAPH course “Destruction and Dynamicsfor Film and Game Production”. You can find the slides at http://bulletphysics.org/siggraph2011

The new Cars 2 game by Disney Interactive is using Bullet physics!

Furthermore, Ralph shared the news that Riptide GP for Android is using Bullet:

“Besides our internal tech there are three key components that made Riptide GP possible:  The Android NDK, Bullet Physics, and FMOD Sound System.  The NDK allows us to write native C++ code which is then optimized for the ARM architecture.  Bullet Physics, which we use for collision detection and rigid body simulation, just worked out of the box.  FMOD Sound System released an Android version of their SDK just in time, which has been working flawlessly since the first release.”

See also http://www.vectorunit.com/blog/2011/6/27/the-tech-behind-riptide-gp.html