IHMC Open Robotics Software

February 2, 2026 · View on GitHub

Current Continuous Integration Status

develop, fast Current develop status

develop, fast Current release status

Robots

This software has been used to power a wide variety of humanoid robots. This includes

Licensing

All of the software in IHMC Open Robotics Software is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Developing with IHMC Open Robotics Software from source

IHMC Open Robotics Software uses the Gradle build system, and requires JDK 17. We recommend working in IntelliJ.

See the following tutorials for installing and using IHMC Open Robotics Software:

Arch Linux will work fine for development. Other GNU/Linux distros will likely work, however largely untested. macOS is partially supported, but incomplete at this time.

To get set up, use our public Confluence pages: https://ihmcrobotics.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PUBLIC/overview

Other IHMC Libraries

IHMC Open Robotics Software both depends on, and is depended on by, a large ecosystem of IHMC robotics libraries. Below is a representative (but not exhaustive) list of related projects used by this repository.

Simulation & Visualization

Math, Geometry, & Dynamics

Data, Logging, & Analysis

Perception & State Estimation

Real-Time, Communication, & Middleware

UI, Graphics, & Media

  • IHMC JavaFX Toolkit
    buildstatus

  • IHMC Graphics Description
    buildstatus

  • IHMC Video Codecs
    buildstatus

Utilities

  • IHMC Commons
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  • IHMC Native Library Loader
    buildstatus

You can find these and many other IHMC projects at:
https://github.com/ihmcrobotics

ROS APIs

We provide a ROS 2 API for many of the core components in our software stack. You can find the .msg definitions for use in your own projects in this project's ihmc-interfaces folder.

Building .jars

IHMC Open Robotics Software is pre-configured for generating Maven publications. You can publish directly from the source code right in to your local Maven repository, e.g. the $HOME/.m2 directory. These builds will be tagged with a build "version" of "LOCAL" instead of an incrementing version number.

An example workflow for developing against a local clone of the software:

  1. Clone IHMC Open Robotics Software
  2. Make modifications
  3. Publish to your local $HOME/.m2 repository

To publish jars to your local Maven repository:

$ cd /path/to/ihmc-open-robotics-software
$ gradle publishAll -PcompositeSearchHeight=0

To depend on the jars in your local Maven repository:

In this example we'll have a compile-time dependency of the locally built Simulation Construction Set project. In the build.gradle of the project you wish to have link against Simulation Construction Set:

repositories {
  mavenLocal()
  <your other repositories>
}

dependencies {
  api("us.ihmc:simulation-construction-set:LOCAL") {
     changing = true
  }
}

Creating a project

To create a project that uses IHMC Open Robotics Software, your project hierarchy needs to take a particular form.

First be sure you have completed the section above titled "Clone repositories".

Next, create your project folder:

mkdir -p src/ihmc/my-project-a

Follow the project setup tutorial at https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/ihmc-build#quick-project-setup.

Your directory structure should now look something like:

src/ihmc
├── my-project-a
│   └── build.gradle.kts
│   └── gradle.properties
│   └── settings.gradle.kts
├── my-project-b
│   └── ...
├── ihmc-open-robotics-software
│   └── atlas
│   └── common-walking-control-modules
│   └── ...
├── my-multi-project-c
│   └── subproject-a
│   │  └── build.gradle.kts
│   └── subproject-b
│      └── build.gradle.kts
├── ...
├── build.gradle.kts
├── gradle.properties
└── settings.gradle.kts

If this is set up correctly, you will have applied the ihmc-build plugin and use the dependency resolver methods exposed by the build extension. Alternatively, you can manually identify dependencies on projects using the normal Gradle syntax for project dependencies. A sample build.gradle dependency block:

/* Normal Gradle way */
dependencies {
  api(project(":ihmc-open-robotics-software:ihmc-java-toolkit"))
  testApi(project(":ihmc-open-robotics-software:ihmc-java-toolkit-test"))
}

/* ihmc-build way */
mainDependencies {
  api("us.ihmc:ihmc-java-toolkit:source")
}
testDependencies {
  api("us.ihmc:ihmc-java-toolkit-test:source")
}

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