Webots controllers in Rust

Status: experimental

This is a reference project that shows how to build controllers for the Webots robot simulator using the Rust programming language.

Getting Started

1. Download and install Webots for your operating system
2. Install Rust if you haven't already
3. Clone this repository
4. Run make to compile the Rust controller and copy it into place
5. Open the sample_project/worlds/my_first_simulation.wbt file in Webots
6. Run the simulation

You should see "The Rust controller has started" in the Webots console.

To make changes to the controller, you can edit src/main.rs and then run make again. You might need to reset the simulation (File > Reset Simulation) or restart Webots to use the updated code.

How this works

At compile time, I use bindgen to convert a list of Webots C header files (see wrapper.h) into Rust structures and types. Those types form a bridge between the Rust-based controller code and the Webots C library that does the hard work of interacting with the simulation engine. See build.rs for more details.

Contributing

Improvements are welcome. If you have an idea, please open an issue so that we can discuss it.

TODO

• Improve API safety. While any of the Webots C functions can be called from Rust, many are marked as unsafe due to raw pointer usage. I have started wrapping a few of them in Rust functions (see lib.rs), but this approach doesn't scale very well given the size of the API.
• More example controllers
• Resolve "not FFI-safe" warnings somehow

License

MIT