Who Uses DART?
Software
DART serves as the backend physics engine for several software projects, including:
Gazebo: Gazebo simulates multiple robots in a 3D environment, with extensive dynamic integration between objects. Gazebo supports multiple physics engines: ODE, Bullet, DART, and Simbody. website, source on bitbucket
Aikido: a C++ library, complete with Python bindings, for solving robotic motion planning and decision making problems. This library is tightly integrated with DART for kinematic/dynamics calculations and OMPL for motion planning.
robot_dart: A generic and lightweight wrapper over DART simulator for fast and flexible robot simulations.
Research
DART has been used in various research domains, including robotics, biomechanics, computer graphics, animation, and physics-based simulation. Notable institutions, universities, or companies that have used DART in their research include Georgia Tech, Oxford University, MIT, Disney Research, and Toyota Research Institute.
DART has been utilized in research areas such as:
Development of black-box priors for model-based policy search for robotics
Bayesian optimization with automatic prior selection
Alternating optimization and quadrature for robust control
Reset-free trial-and-error learning for robot damage recovery
Data-driven approach to simulating realistic human joint constraints
Multi-task learning with gradient-guided policy specialization
Learning human behaviors for robot-assisted dressing
Expanding motor skills through relay neural networks
Learning to navigate cloth using haptics
Simulation-based design of dynamic controllers for humanoid balancing
Humanoid manipulation planning using backward-forward search
Evolutionary optimization for parameterized whole-body dynamic motor skills
Dexterous manipulation of cloth
Multiple contact planning for minimizing damage of humanoid falls
Animating human dressing
Coupling cloth and rigid bodies for dexterous manipulation
Orienting in mid-air through configuration changes to achieve a rolling landing for reducing impact after a fall
Dexterous manipulation using both palm and fingers
Several conferences and journals where DART has been prominently featured include the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), and ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH Asia).
As of February 2023, DART had over 777 stars on GitHub, and DART has been cited over 236 times, indicating its widespread adoption and use in the research community.
More research papers cited DART can be found at Google Scholar.
Note
If you are using DART in your project and would like to be listed here, please send a pull request to the GitHub repository.