Development

The Orocos Project - an open-source robotics library

By Forrest Cook
September 23, 2009

OROCOS, the Open Robot Control Software project, is a collection of software for use in developing robotics applications. The OROCOS project's history document states that the project was created in December, 2000 and was inspired by conversations on the European Robotics Network mailing list. OROCOS can be configured as one of the components of Robot OS, which was recently looked at in an LWN article. From the About the OROCOS project document:

Orocos is the acronym of the Open Robot Control Software project. The project's aim is to develop a general-purpose, free software, and modular framework for robot and machine control. The Orocos project supports 4 C++ libraries: the Real-Time Toolkit, the Kinematics and Dynamics Library, the Bayesian Filtering Library and the Orocos Component Library (Components for Control).

Further:

Robotics or machine control in general is a very broad field, and many roboticists are pursuing quite different goals, dealing with different levels of complexity, real-time control constraints, application areas, user interaction, etc. So, because the robotics community is not homogeneous, Orocos targets four different categories of Users:

The four user categories include:

Framework Builders: concentrate on the top-level design of the robotics control software.
Component Builders: provide services within an application by using the framework infrastructure.
Application Builders: integrate the Framework and components into a specific application using Application Templates.
End Users: use the applications to run a desired robotic task.

OROCOS is currently in a state of active development. New releases of two major OROCOS components have recently been announced.

Orocos Real-Time Tookit v1.10.0: "The Orocos development team is pleased to announce the next major feature release of the Real-Time Toolkit, a C++ toolkit for building component based, real-time robotics and machine control applications. The focus of this release was on portability and added a new target: native win32 builds. This release is backwards compatible with all 1.x.y releases, although some functionality has been deprecated or alternative usage patterns are preferred."

Orocos Component Library 1.10.0: "A new release was created of OCL, updating documentation and keeping up with the new features in RTT 1.10. Hopefully, this will be the last time there is a major OCL release in this form. We're discussing a new partitioning of the component repositories separating the application/robot specific components from the infrastructure components. Hopefully this will more clearly separate the 'common application environment' from the robot specific application itself."

The OROCOS code has been licensed under a combination of LGPL and GPL with a runtime exception. "Both the RTT and BFL software are licensed as GPL + runtime exception, which is exactly the same license as the GNU Standard C++ library (which is used by any C++ program running under Linux), and has in practice the same intentions as the LGPL license. The technical reason we could not longer use the LGPL license for RTT/BFL software was that the LGPL is not compatible with C++ templates, which are used extensively in the RTT/BFL libraries."

OROCOS has been applied to a number of real-world applications. Some of the more interesting uses include an interface to the Blender 3D content creation suite that allows controlling a mill, an autonomous automobile project, a 3D motion tracking system and EasyOROCOS CAD: "EasyOROCOS CAD is an interface which supports the interactive definition of a manipulator kinematics (and 3D geometry), and from that it generates an Orocos controller of the manipulator, in the form of a task running under Linux RTAI."

OROCOS brings a high level set of robotics tools to the Linux platform. Those who adopt it can avoid re-inventing the wheel, and will be able to tap into an active community of robotics software developers.

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