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Phobos is an open-source add-on for Blender which allows WYSIWYG editing of robot models and environments for robotics research and applications. By supporting various description formats, Phobos provides input to a multitude of software, including popular robotics frameworks and simulation tools.
Creating adequate simulation models of a robot is a difficult task that especially in the world of open-source and research oftentimes comes down to editing complex custom description text files in cumbersome formats by hand. This is not only error-prone, slow and boring, it also forces the robotics researcher or enthusiast to give up any visual context and painstakingly re-iterate mechanical design using a text editor. While there are some remedies for this problem such as macro languages for robot definition or plugins for CAD-software allowing to export the structure of a robot, none of these allow the user to intuitively create robot models from scratch or customize the models for use in specialized applications such as collision planning or simulation. This is a gap that Phobos aims to fill and we hope that many users out there will find it useful for their needs.
This documentation is still far from extensive. There are probably a lot of difficulties for Blender beginners that we have overlooked and there are certainly features in Phobos that we have not covered at all or at least not comprehensively enough. We therefore appreciate if you contact us about issues you have with Phobos. Either the documentation might not be sufficient or you have stumbled upon a bug - both cases are something we would like to know.
Note that you can find the code documentation on our GitHub Page.
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