Orocos: Open Robot Control Software

Orocos is an Open Source C++ software framework for building real-time Control Components and applications in automation and robotics. Orocos offers components for motion interpolation, kinematics, control algorithms, estimation and hardware access. Orocos takes care of the Operating System and device driver abstraction for these components. All components are on-line configurable using XML files or using an interactive component browser. Orocos allows to define new components in an extendable way. An Orocos component has a rich interface which optionally contains properties (for configuration), events (for state machines), methods (for algorithms), commands (for delegating work) and data ports for streaming data. Orocos aims to provide safe and easy to use C++ classes for accessing this interface. A 'C' like scripting language allows to use the same primitives for rapid prototype development of algorithms and event driven state machines. Orocos has choosen CORBA as middleware to distribute components over a network, which is work in progress.