Open robot control software: the OROCOS project

This paper introduces the OROCOS project that aims at becoming a general-purpose and open robot control software package. OROCOS follows the open source development model that has been proven to work in many other general-purpose software packages, such as Linux, Apache, Perl or LATEX. The paper focuses on the long-term vision of this start-up project, motivates which strategic and innovative design decisions are to be taken (a CORBA-like component architecture being the most important one), and lists other projects on which OROCOS could build. The success of OROCOS depends critically on how many researchers and engineers can be motivated to contribute code, documentation and feedback to the project.