Welcome

RobWork is a collection of C++ libraries for simulation and control of robot systems. RobWork is used for research and education as well as for practical robot applications. Features of the library include:

Kinematic modeling of various types of industrial manipulators, serial-, tree-, and parallel structures.
General path-planning, path optimization, collision detection and inverse kinematics algorithms.
Both kinematic and dynamic simulation of manipulators, controllers and sensor.
Plugins for grasp simulation of suction cups, parallel- and dexterous grippers.
Simple and extendible GUI and plugin system for integrating user algorithms and visualizations
A script interface based on SWIG which extends RobWork to multiple script languages such as Python, Lua, Java...

Please note that RobWork is NOT a component framework or communications midlelayer such as ROS, Orocos, Orca, or many of the other robotics frameworks. It is a c++ library of algorithms, vizualization tools and methods that are usefull in most robotics contexts.

Getting started

RobWork is developed at the robotics department of the Maersk McKinney Moller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark. The focus of the department is on industrial robots and their applications.

RobWork 0.5.1 Released

RobWork version 0.5.1 is now released. This release contains mainly bugfixes but also has the following important changes:

- The source in now continuesly monitored by a build server. Less compilation problems should thus occur.

- Better support for Visual Studio.

- Smart-pointers to RobWork types are now defined as ClassName::Ptr instead of ClassNamePtr. To use the old pointer style you need to define RW_USE_DEPRECATED

- Minor updates and improvements all around.

This version can be found on svn at: https://svn.mip.sdu.dk/RobWork/branches/release-0.5-stable

The release 0.6 will soon be available and will contain significant upgrades to the e.g. visualization and it will natively include the RobWork simulation framework RobWorkSim. An early version of this is available on svn.

Until then, please enjoy release 0.5.1.

The RobWork Development Team

64 bit support and Debian SDK packages

RobWork now compiles natively on 64 bit platforms. See the updated installation instructions for Xerces, Boost and Qt for more information on the compilation process for the supported platforms:

GCC
MinGW
Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010

In addition, we are also in the process of providing binary SDK installation packages for RobWork. At the moment, you can get Debian packages for Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10, but we are working hard on providing packages for the Windows-based compilers.

The binary SDK packages will be suitable for those interested in creating their own RobWork/RobWorkStudio plugins (see the example folders in the installation directories for some sample plugins). If, however, you want to maintain a local checkout of the latest SVN revision of RobWork or if you wish to make you own modifications to the RobWork source, we still recommend that you perform an SVN checkout and follow the build instructions in the installation section.

See the download section for more information on how to get the source and SDK packages.

Dashboard up and running

Thanks to Anders B. the dashboards currently showing nightly builds are now running.

http://www.robwork.org/cdash/index.php?project=RobWork

http://www.robwork.org/cdash/index.php?project=RobWorkStudio

RobWork 0.5 Released

Dear All

We are pleased to inform you that a new RobWork and RobWorkStudio release (version 0.5.0) is now available. The source code can be found in the download section of the homepage. The binary versions will follow shortly.

New RobWork features in this release includes:

- New structure for rw::geometry package in RobWork.

- Updated rwlibs::drawable to use rw::geometry and share a common representation.

- New structure for collision detection.

- The lua script interface has been updated

- Enhancement to cmake structure to enable maintaining both a debug and a release version simultanously

- Support Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and MinGW 4.4

- Introduction of rwlibs::simulation for simulation sensors

- Plugin structure for RobWork.

New RobWorkStudio features in this release includes:

- Updated to match RobWork version 0.5

- New CMake structure

- Added plugin for lua scripting

- Added plugin for sensor visualization

- Introduction of reusable GUI components for image viewing and opengl view.

On SVN this release can be found in the branch “release-0.5”. The content will be merged into the trunk at the end of this week.

Best regards

Jimmy and Lars-Peter