The Webots project started in 1996, initially developed by Dr. Olivier Michel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland and then from 1998 by Cyberbotics Ltd. as a proprietary licensed software.

[1] Webots includes a large collection of freely modifiable models of robots, sensors, actuators and objects.

The graphical properties include the shape, dimensions, position and orientation, colors, and texture of the object.

The ODE library allows one to accurately simulate physical properties of objects such as velocity, inertia and friction.

The robot controller programs can be written outside of Webots in C, C++, Python, ROS, Java and MATLAB using a simple API.