Simulating the evolution of soft and rigid-body robots

In evolutionary robotics, evolutionary methods are used to optimize robots to different tasks. Because using physical robots is costly in terms of both time and money, simulated robots are generally used instead. Most physics engines are written in C++ which can be a barrier for new programmers. In this paper we present two Python wrappers, Pyrosim and Evosoro, around two well used simulators, Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) and Voxelyze/VoxCAD, which respectively handle rigid and soft bodied simulation. Python is an easier language to understand so more time can be spent on developing the actual experiment instead of programming the simulator.