OpenRAVE includes a seamless integration of simulation, visualization, planning, scripting and control. The plugin architecture allows users to easily write custom controllers or extend functionality. Using OpenRAVE plugins, any planning algorithm, robot control, or sensing-based subsystem can be distributed and dynamically loaded at run-time; this distributed nature frees developers from struggling with monolithic code-bases. Users of OpenRAVE can concentrate on the development of planning and scripting aspects of a problem without having to explicitly manage the details of robot kinematics and dynamics, collision detection, world updates, and robot control. OpenRAVE provides a powerful Python API for scripting demos, which makes it simple to control and monitor the demo and environment state. There are also interfaces for Octave and Matlab.
OpenRAVE’s major design goals and features are:
One of OpenRAVE’s strongest points when compared with other planning packages is the idea of being able to apply algorithms to any scenario with very little modification when robots or target objects change. Users of OpenRAVE can concentrate on the development of planning and scripting aspects of a problem without having to explicitly manage the details of robot kinematics, dynamics, collision detection, world updates, sensor modeling, and robot control.
OpenRAVE has been used for planning on many real robotics systems. It’s architcture makes it possible for planning-enabled robots to work consistently in a continuously changing and unpredictable environment. Many new layer of functionality have been developed that go beyond the basic kinematics, collision detection, and graphics interface requirements of classic robotics libraries. It provides a set of interfaces that let users modify existing functions and expand OpenRAVE-enabled modules without having to recompile OpenRAVE or deal with messy monolithic code-bases.
OpenRAVE was founded by Rosen Diankov at the Quality of Life Technology Center in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. It was inspired from the RAVE simulator James Kuffner had started developing in 1995 and used for his experiments ever since. The OpenRAVE project was started in 2006 and is a complete rewrite of RAVE. It is actively being maintained at the JSK Lab at University of Tokyo.
Rosen Diankov - project leader