What is sap_warp?

SAP Warp is a physics simulation tool for robotics, focused specifically on how robot bodies make contact with surfaces. When building or training robots, one of the hardest problems to simulate accurately is what happens when a robot foot touches the ground or a robotic hand grasps an object. Getting that friction and contact behavior right in a simulator is critical for building robots that work in the real world. SAP Warp is designed to do that accurately and quickly. The project implements a specific mathematical approach called the SAP contact formulation, which comes from published academic research on making contact simulation more stable and predictable. It follows a similar implementation used in Drake, a well-known robotics simulation platform from MIT, but runs on top of Warp, a toolkit from NVIDIA that can use GPU acceleration to run simulations much faster than CPU-only tools. The repository comes with a set of ready-made robot scenes you can load and run immediately. These include a cartpole (a classic robotics test setup), a multi-legged ant robot, several robotic arms (including the widely-used Franka Panda, AgileX Piper, and Universal Robots UR10), and walking robots like the ANYmal quadruped and Unitree humanoids. You can view simulations in a browser-based 3D viewer that starts locally when you run the tool. SAP Warp is also compatible with Newton, a separate physics simulation framework, so teams already using Newton can add the SAP contact solver without rewriting their setup. The project is maintained by researchers from the UCLA AI and Vision Computing Lab and Toyota Research Institute. The code is released under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows both personal and commercial use. It is intended primarily for researchers and engineers working on robotics simulation.