Drake (dragon in Middle English) is a C++ toolbox started by theRobot Locomotion Group at the MITComputer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Thedevelopment team has now grown significantly, with coredevelopment led by the Toyota Research Institute. Itis a collection of tools for analyzing the dynamics of our robots and buildingcontrol systems for them, with a heavy emphasis on optimization-baseddesign/analysis.

While there are an increasing number of simulation tools available forrobotics, most of them function like a black box: commands go in, sensors comeout. Drake aims to simulate even very complex dynamics of robots (e.g.including friction, contact, aerodynamics, ), but always with an emphasis onexposing the structure in the governing equations (sparsity, analyticalgradients, polynomial structure, uncertainty quantification, ) and making thisinformation available for advanced planning, control, and analysis algorithms.Drake provides an interface to Python to enable rapid-prototyping of newalgorithms, and also aims to provide solid open-source implementations for manystate-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, we hope Drake provides many compellingexamples that can help people get started and provide much needed benchmarks.We are excited to accept user contributions to improve the coverage.

You can read more about the vision for Drake in this blogpost.

We hope you find this tool useful. Please seeGetting Help if you wish to share your comments,questions, success stories, or frustrations. And please contribute your bestbug fixes, features, and examples!

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Drake: Model-Based Design and Verification for Robotics