Chapter 7: Tutorials
The aim of this chapter is to explain the fundamental concepts of Webots required to create your own simulations. Learning is focused on the modeling of robots and of their environment, as well as on the programming of robot controllers. You will also learn where to find the documentation to go further.
This chapter is suitable for absolute beginners in Webots. A background in programming is nevertheless required. The examples are written in C language. If you are not familiar with the C language, you should be able to understand this chapter anyway, because the C programs below are very simple. Except for programming, you don't need any particular knowledge to go through the tutorials included in this chapter. However a basic background knowledge in robotics, mathematics, modeling and tree representation might turn out to be helpful. Experienced Webots users may skip the first tutorials. However, we would recommend them to read at least the introduction and conclusion of these tutorials.
Each section of this chapter (except the first one and the last one) is a tutorial. Each tutorial has a precise educational objective explained in the first paragraph. The acquired concepts are then summarized in the conclusion subsection. A tutorial is designed as a sequence of interactive steps. The knowledge acquired in a tutorial is often required to continue with the next tutorial. Therefore we strongly recommend you to respect their natural order. Moreover we recommend you to ensure you understood all the concepts of a tutorial before proceeding further.
A Webots PRO license or a 30-days trial license is required to follow all the tutorials. However, an EDU license is sufficient to follow about 95% of this chapter, as it won't allow you to program supervisor processes and physics plugins.
The last section will provide you with some hints to address problems that are not covered in this chapter.
The solutions of the tutorials are located into the projects/samples/tutorials subdirectory of the Webots installation directory.
We hope you will enjoy your first steps with Webots. Meanwhile, we would really appreciate to receive your feedback regarding this chapter.