OpenRAVE Plugins
⚠️I no longer maintain these plugins, so your milage may vary using them with modern dependencies. However, as of mid-2021, these plugins are still in regular use by several research groups that use OpenRAVE - so they should work with minor modification.
I have released several open source OpenRAVE plugins for robotic manipulation. Most of these plugins were developed in collaboration with my colleagues in the UW Personal Robotics Lab (at the time: Carnegie Mellon University).
A robot-agnostic Python library developed by the Personal Robotics Laboratory at University of Washington (formerly Carnegie Mellon University) to simplify using OpenRAVE in Python scripts. This includes a high-level planning pipeline, helper functions, and visualization tools. This project is a collaboration with many members of the Personal Robotics Lab.
HERB stocking a library using software written using PrPy.
HERB clearing a table using software written using PrPy.
An OpenRAVE collision checking plugin that uses the Flexible Collision Library (FCL) to perform collision checks. Benchmarks show that this plugin is 2–7× faster at performing binary checks than the ODE collision detection plugin included with OpenRAVE. This project is a collaboration with Chris Dellin and Jennifer King.
Figure 3 from this paper. FCL take less time for environment (darker) and self (lighter) collision check for both all links (All) and only the active affected by the active DOFs (Act). FCL-PA further speeds up FCL via pre-allocation.
An OpenRAVE planner plugin that uses the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) to solve geometric motion planning queries. It includes utilities for constructing an OMPL state space from an OpenRAVE robot, checking state validity using an OpenRAVE collision detector, and converting between OpenRAVE trajectories and OMPL paths. This project is a collaboration with Chris Dellin, Matthew Klingensmith, and Jennifer King.
An OpenRAVE viewer plugin that publishes the environment as interactive markers for visualization in RViz. The plugin supports both opening an RViz window in the same process as OpenRAVE and, with reduced functionality, viewing the markers in an external process. This project is a collaboration with Matthew Klingensmith.
An OpenRAVE plugin for loading URDF and SRDF files into OpenRAVE. This project is a collaboration with Pras Velagapudi.
An OpenRAVE planner plugin for smoothing robot manipulator trajectories under geometric constraints and bounded acceleration. This plugin is based on code originally distributed with the paper "Fast Smoothing of Manipulator Trajectories using Optimal Bounded-Acceleration Shortcuts" by K. Hauser and V. Ng-Thow-Hing. This project is a collaboration with Pras Velagapudi.