Software & Middleware

Drake

Drake is an open-source C++ and Python toolbox for model-based design and verification of robotic systems, initiated by Russ Tedrake's group at MIT and developed with the Toyota Research Institute. It provides careful multibody dynamics with rigorous contact modeling, a systems framework for composing controllers and estimators, and bindings to mathematical programming solvers for trajectory optimization and control synthesis. Drake emphasizes numerical accuracy and gradients over raw simulation speed.

Why it matters for physical AI

Optimization-based planning and contact-implicit trajectory synthesis complement learned policies, and Drake is a standard research platform for that model-based half of modern manipulation and locomotion stacks.