A Free Software Framework for Advanced Robot Control

This paper explains the goals and current status of the Open Robot Control Software project (Orocos). This project builds a software framework for generic control problems, with robot control as first target. The first development in the project was the infrastructure for an application-independent control “core.” This core can run in hard real-time (on RTAI and RT-Linux), but also in “user space” of GNU/Linux. In parallel to the design and implementation of the control infrastructure, Orocos builds general-purpose class libraries for robotics applications. For example, a kinematics and dynamics library, that is designed to (eventually) model and simulate all possible dynamic systems, not just in the mechanical domain. At the time of writing this text, the project has reached a stage in which the code base can be used to control simple robot systems, on top of RTAI or GNU/Linux. Another year or so will be needed before a stable and feature-rich code becomes available.