Last Updated on May 1, 2026
ARGoS is a physics-based simulator designed to simulate large-scale robot swarms.
Benchmark results show that ARGoS can perform physics-accurate simulation involving thousands of robots in a fraction of real time.
ARGoS provides several physics engines, such as 2D kinematics, 2D dynamics, and 3D dynamics. ARGoS can run more than one physics engine in the same experiment and the user can choose which robots to simulate with which engine so that the simulation is optimised and accurate.
ARGoS also offers a number of alternative visualisation possibilities, such as a simple 3D OpenGL renderer, an offline POVRay renderer and a tabular text renderer for data collection.
The modular architecture of ARGoS allows the user to easily add new robots, actuators, sensors, physics engines and renderers. The simulator can be configured with an intuitive XML file and new modules programmed by the user are automatically registered and made available for use in the XML file.
Key Features
- Multi-threaded and deeply modular architecture, more flexible than any simulator with equivalent features.
- The possibility to run multiple physics engines at the same time.
- The possibility to divide the physical space in region, and assign different regions to different physics.
Website: www.argos-sim.info
Support: Documentation, Forums, GitHub code repository
Developer: Carlo Pinciroli and contributors
License: MIT License
ARGoS is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Robotics Software | |
|---|---|
| NASA Vision Workbench | Image processing in the context of machine vision |
| DART | Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit |
| Gazebo Sim | Robot simulation made easy |
| AprilTag | Visual fiducial system popular for robotics research |
| Webots | Multi-platform desktop application used to simulate robots |
| ROS | Software framework for building robot applications |
| ARGoS | Physics-based simulator designed to simulate robot swarms |
| MoveIt | Robotic manipulation platform for ROS 2 |
| OpenRTM-aist | Component-oriented development of robot systems |
| The Player Project | Cross-platform robot device interface & server |
| Urbi | Universal Robot Body Interface |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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