MARS (Machina Arte Robotum Simulans) is a cross-platform simulation and visualisation tool created for robotics research developed at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI-RIC) and the University of Bremen. It runs on (Ubuntu) Linux, Mac and Windows and consists of a core framework containing all main simulation components, a GUI (based on Qt), 3D visualization (using OSG) and a physics core (based on ODE).
MARS is designed in a modular manner and can be used very flexibly, e.g. by running the physics simulation without visualization and GUI. It is possible to extend MARS writing your own plugins and many plugins introducing various functionality such as HUDs or custom ground reaction forces already exist - and it's easy to write your own.

If you have questions about MARS not suited for GitHub issues or would like to receive updates on upcoming releases, you can subscribe to the mars users mailing list.

We don't yet provide binaries for MARS, thus installing it requires downloading the source and building it locally. You can do this using PyBob, a Python tool that will check out all necessary repositories and build MARS for you. You can find PyBob and the installation instructions here.

NOTE: A binary version to test MARS can be found at the Bagel project: https://github.com/dfki-ric/bagel_wiki/wiki

Also the tutorial in that project, as first hands on, might be interessting if you want to try out MARS: https://github.com/dfki-ric/bagel_wiki/wiki/bagel_robot

You can find MARS' user documentation on its GitHub Wiki and code documentation on its GitHub Page.

MARS is distributed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).