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Welcome to the Phobos Wiki!
Phobos is an open-source add-on for Blender which allows WYSIWYG editing of robot models and environments for robotics research and applications.simplifies creating and editing robot models and environments. By supporting various description formats, Phobos provides input to a multitude of software, including popular robotics frameworks and simulation tools.
Creating adequate simulation models of a robot is a difficult task that especially in the world of open-source and research oftentimes comes down to editing complex custom description text files in cumbersome formats by hand. This is not only error-prone, slow and boring, it also forces the robotics researcher or enthusiast to give up any visual context and painstakingly re-iterate mechanical design using a text editor. While there are some remedies for this problem such as macro languages for robot definition or plugins for CAD-software allowing to export the structure of a robot, none of these allow the user to intuitively create robot models from scratch or customize the models for use in specialized applications such as collision planning or simulation. This is a gap that Phobos aims to fill and we hope that many users out there will find it useful for their needs.
See the list of supported formats.
Check out the Phobos milestones if you're interested in its further development. We try to keep them up to date, but there may always be short-term changes. Currently we mainly develop Phobos to fit our own project needs, which sometimes arise on short notice.
If you would like to contribute to Phobos, you can start by checking out which issues we work on at the moment. You can also have a look at our code documentation.
This documentation is still far from extensive. There are probably a lot of difficulties for Blender beginners that we have overlooked and there are certainly features in Phobos that we have not covered at all or at least not comprehensively enough. We therefore appreciate if you contact us about issues you have with Phobos. Either the documentation might not be sufficient or you have stumbled upon a bug - both cases are something we would like to know.
- Install Phobos
- Read the introduction to Phobos, MARS, SMURF and Blender
- [Watch the video tutorial](Video Tutorial)
- Read the walkthrough on how to build a robot
- Check the FAQ for some special questions.
- Looking for something specific? Check the page index on the right side.
- Having issues? Check the troubleshooting section.
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