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PyBullet Quickstart Guide

Erwin Coumans, Yunfei Bai, 2016-2022

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Introduction

PyBullet is a fast and easy to use Python module for robotics simulation and machine learning,

LCP constraint solver, similar to the Articulated Islands Algorithm in this thesis, It uses the

Articulated Body Algorithm for linear time forward dynamics and creation of the solver A matrix.

Aside from physics simulation, there are bindings to rendering, with a CPU renderer

(TinyRenderer) and OpenGL 3.x rendering and visualization and support for Virtual Reality

headsets such as HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. PyBullet also has functionality to perform collision

detection queries (closest points, overlapping pairs, ray intersection test etc) and to add debug

rendering (debug lines and text). PyBullet has cross-platform built-in client-server support for

shared memory, UDP and TCP networking. So you can run PyBullet on Linux connecting to a

Windows VR server.

PyBullet wraps the new Bullet C-API, which is designed to be independent from the underlying

you use PyBullet in your research, please add a citation.

The installation of PyBullet is as simple as (sudo) pip install PyBullet (Python 2.x), pip3 install

PyBullet. This will expose the PyBullet module as well as pybullet_envs Gym environments.

Hello PyBullet World

Here is a PyBullet introduction script that we discuss step by step:

connect, disconnect, bullet_client

After importing the PyBullet module, the first thing to do is 'connecting' to the physics simulation.

mode does allow rendering of images using the built-in software renderer through the

'getCameraImage' API. This can be useful for running simulations in the cloud on servers

without GPU.

You can provide your own data files, or you can use the PyBullet_data package that ships with

PyBullet. For this, import pybullet_data and register the directory using

pybullet.setAdditionalSearchPath(pybullet_data.getDataPath()).

getConnectionInfo

Given a physicsClientId will return the list [isConnected, connectionMethod]

isConnected

isConnected will return true if connected, false otherwise, given a physicsClientId.

The DIRECT connection sends the commands directly to the physics engine, without using any

transport layer and no graphics visualization window, and directly returns the status after

executing the command.

The GUI connection will create a new graphical user interface (GUI) with 3D OpenGL rendering,

within the same process space as PyBullet. On Linux and Windows this GUI runs in a separate

thread, while on OSX it runs in the same thread due to operating system limitations. On Mac

OSX you may see a spinning wheel in the OpenGL Window, until you run a 'stepSimulation' or

other PyBullet command.

The commands and status messages are sent between PyBullet client and the GUI physics

simulation server using an ordinary memory buffer.