YARP: Yet Another Robot Platform

• Main Authors: Giorgio Metta, Paul Fitzpatrick, Lorenzo Natale
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2006-03-01
• Series: International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5772/5761

We describe YARP, Yet Another Robot Platform, an open-source project that encapsulates lessons from our experience in building humanoid robots. The goal of YARP is to minimize the effort devoted to infrastructure-level software development by facilitating code reuse, modularity and so maximize research-level development and collaboration. Humanoid robotics is a “bleeding edge” field of research, with constant flux in sensors, actuators, and processors. Code reuse and maintenance is therefore a significant challenge. We describe the main problems we faced and the solutions we adopted. In short, the main features of YARP include support for inter-process communication, image processing as well as a class hierarchy to ease code reuse across different hardware platforms. YARP is currently used and tested on Windows, Linux and QNX6 which are common operating systems used in robotics.