Evaluation of physics engines for robotic simulations with a special focus on the dynamics of walking robots

Detailed simulations of robotic systems, including their components and dynamics, play an increasingly important role in the development of new robotic systems and their applications. There are many physics engines with a mature development stage, but all of them suffer from fundamental inaccuracies due to the approximative character of the internal calculations. This article provides an in-detail evaluation of the physics engines Bullet, ODE and PhysX with a focus on robotics and legged locomotion. We present a variety of run-time experiments which provide an insight into these engines, their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings offer valuable information for the application-specific selection of a physics engine for robotics simulations.