# RobotLocomotion/drake

Model-based design and verification for robotics.

Repository: https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/drake
Homepage: https://drake.mit.edu
Language: C++
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Topics: robotics, drake
Last push: 2026-08-26T22:19:31+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 99/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 98, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4602, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 19, "gap_med": 30, "n_releases_24m": 26}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4158, forks 1382 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:37.383022+00:00)

## What it is
Drake is a C++ toolbox (with Python bindings) for model-based design and verification of robotics systems, developed by the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT and now led by the Toyota Research Institute. It provides tools for analyzing robot dynamics, simulating complex physical phenomena like friction and contact, and building optimization-based planning, control, and analysis algorithms.

## Use cases
- simulate robot dynamics with contact and friction
- design and verify control systems for robots
- solve trajectory optimization problems
- compute multibody kinematics and dynamics
- prototype robotics algorithms in Python
- model and analyze dynamical systems
- solve mathematical programs for planning and control

## When to choose
- you need rigorous, optimization-based robot dynamics simulation and analysis rather than a black-box simulator
- you are doing research or advanced development in robot planning, control, or verification
- you want analytical gradients, sparsity structure, and uncertainty quantification exposed from the governing equations
- you need a well-supported open-source toolbox with C++ performance and Python prototyping

## When to avoid
- you need a lightweight, easy-to-learn game-style physics engine for simple simulations
- you require Windows or other unsupported platforms in official configurations
- you want a quick plug-and-play robotics middleware rather than a deep modeling and analysis toolkit
- your team cannot work with a large C++ codebase and its build requirements

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: simulation, robotics, machine-learning, math
- domain: robotics, simulation
- platform: cpp, python
- tags: model-based-design, control-systems, multibody-dynamics, verification, trajectory-optimization, c-plus-plus, python-bindings, optimization, algorithms, research, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- RobotLocomotion/drake (main) score 99

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:37.383022+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:22:50.403594+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:37.383022+00:00, sha 52c891e1ed91)
  - homepage: https://drake.mit.edu (fetched 2026-08-29T09:13:34.861850+00:00, sha 53411b5cb1f4)
  - site_page: https://drake.mit.edu/installation.html (fetched 2026-08-29T09:13:34.870966+00:00, sha be088019cf09)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.