Educational and Research Software

OOPSMP: Object-Oriented Programming System for Motion Planning

I developed OOPSMP during my Ph.D. at Rice University as an extensive package for motion planning that is easy to extend, robust, and efficient. OOPSMP can be used for motion-planning research and as a teaching tool in robotics or game design.

OOPSMP has become an integral part of robotics at Rice University and is being used by a growing number of researchers, professors, students, and robotics enthusiasts worldwide. Currently, there are OOPSMP users from over 40 different universities and research institutions worldwide.

I am still actively involved in the development of OOPSMP.

CURRENT RELEASE [version 1.1, September 2008]

• Implementation of popular motion planners
  Probabilistic RoadMap (PRM), Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT), Expansive Spaces Tree (EST), bi-directional tree planners, and others.
• Solutions of geometric path-planning problems or motion planning with dynamics
  Motion planners in OOPSMP can be used to solve geometric path-planning problems or motion-planning problems with dynamics. OOPSMP implements several kinematic and second-order dynamic models of cars, differential drives, and unicycles, and makes it easy to add new models of different systems.
• General-purpose utilities
  • Linear algebra: low-dimensional vector and matrix operations.
  • Topology: rigid body topology in 2D and 3D, such as SO(2) and SE(3) [rotations in 3D as quaternions].
  • Numerical integration: fixed-step and adaptive-step methods, such as 2nd and 4th order Runge-Kutta, 5th order Runge-Kutta-Cash-Karp and Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg, 8th order Runge-Kutta-Prince-Dormand.
  • Data structures and algorithms: sets, disjoint sets, updatable heaps, graphs, DFS, BFS, Dijkstra's shortest path, A*.
  • Proximity algorithms: nearest neighbors for metric spaces.
• Plug-and-play
  One of the most distinctive features of OOPSMP is that it allows to plug-and-play existing code or new code via XML specifications.