Open Dynamics Engine

The Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) is a physics engine written in C/C++. Its two main components are a rigid body dynamics simulation engine and a collision detection engine. It is free software licensed both under the BSD license and the LGPL.

ODE was started in 2001 and has already been used in many applications and games, such as BloodRayne 2, Call of Juarez, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Titan Quest, World of Goo, X-Moto and OpenSimulator.

The Open Dynamics Engine is used for simulating the dynamic interactions between bodies in space. It is not tied to any particular graphics package although it includes a basic one called drawstuff. It supports several geometries: box, sphere, capsule (cylinder capped with hemispheres), triangle mesh, cylinder and heightmap.

Higher level environments that allow non-programmers access to ODE include Player Project, Webots, Opensimulator, anyKode Marilou and V-REP.

ODE is a popular choice for robotics simulation applications, with scenarios such as mobile robot locomotion and simple grasping. ODE has some drawbacks in this field, for example the method of approximating friction and poor support for joint-damping.