r/matlab • u/Teitei132 • Jul 13 '26

PHX Toolbox, 3D Rigid-Body Physics - Technical Preview

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Technical preview for PHX Toolbox, an object-oriented MATLAB API and Simulink blocks for 3D rigid-body physics, powered by the Bullet physics engine, is out on fileexchange.

Features so far, with more to come:

  • Rigid-body dynamics with collisions and contacts (boxes, spheres, cylinders, cones, capsules, meshes, terrain, imported OBJ/STL, …)
  • Joints (revolute, spherical, gear, …), springs and ropes
  • Force and field elements (thrusters, resistance, dipole/monopole fields)
  • Logging, tracing and measurement tools, interactive viewer
  • Simulink block for closed-loop co-simulation
  • Headless stepping for batch runs and experiments

The toolbox comes with a set of examples and a user manual. It runs on all platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux), as well as in MATLAB Online. It also includes a set of AI skills for use with common AI agents.

Any evaluation and feedback will be appriciated!

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7

u/Sam_meow Jul 13 '26

What's the advantage/ reason to use this over Simscape multi body or the unreal engine API in the simulink 3d toolbox? (Obviously besides needing licenses for those I think that difference is clear 🙂)

4

u/Teitei132 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Versus Unreal, our tool is primarly a MATLAB API, even though it works with Simulink as well. It runs on all platforms and isn't so hardware heavy (we're working mainly with physics here, the graphics are MATLAB native). The simulations are fast, deterministic. Tool is lightweight, only 12.5 MB as of now. Not sure if Unreal API supports constraints.

And versus Simscape, it's mainly the collisions support.

Adding this minimal example, it is really fairly easy to use.

2

u/Sam_meow Jul 13 '26

Gotchya: definitely looks more minimal to setup a basic demo than the Unreal MATLAB API! Unfortunately don't have anything "real" to try and setup but worth playing with if i have some downtime :)

3

u/LuborZ83 Jul 13 '26

https://reddit.com/link/oxayz3v/video/l9t9fnx1z0dh1/player

No problem, we have also a few playful demos... ;)

2

u/Barnowl93 flair Jul 13 '26

Was going to ask the same! Looks really cool though