Accepted at Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Coming online as a publication in advance very soon.

Authors: Jesse Haviland Peter Corke

Abstract

Robotics is powered by software. Software tools control the rate of innovation in robotics research, drive the growth of the robotics industry, and power the education of future innovators and developers. There are nearly 900,000 open-source repositories on GitHub tagged with the keyword ``robotics'', a potentially vast resource but only a fraction of that is truly accessible in terms of quality, licensibility, understandability, and total cost of ownership. The challenge is to match this resource to the needs of students, researchers and companies to power cutting-edge research and real-world industrial solutions. This article reviews software tools for robotics, those created by the community at large as well as those created by the authors, and their impact on education, research and industry.