Is there an interactive, imperative way to manipulate Webots simulations using Python, instead of using the contorller script? E.g. the way you can interact with OpenAI Gym. Thanks!
No, there is no such a thing available out of the box in Webots. However, it shouldn't be difficult to implement a set of Python commands that could be called from an interactive Python shell. Such commands would communicate with a slave Webots controller via some IPC (Inter Process Communication) to send commands to a running simulation.
Interactive terminal for Python on Webots?