A field guide to not reinventing the robot

What it does

This repository is a curated directory of open-source robotics software, sorting hundreds of libraries and simulators into categories like dynamics simulation, inverse kinematics, SLAM, and grasping. Each entry is tagged with an activity badge—active, slow, stale, or archived—and a GitHub star count, giving you a quick health check before you click. Think of it as a field guide for dependency shopping in a fragmented ecosystem.

The interesting bit

The list includes a separate COMPARISONS.md for physics engines, which elevates it above a mere link dump. In a discipline where toolchains often rot faster than hardware, the traffic-light maintenance legend is arguably more valuable than the catalog itself.

Key highlights

• Covers the full robotics stack: physics engines, motion planning, vision, reinforcement learning, fluid simulation, and humanoid-specific tools
• Activity legend (🟢 <1yr, 🟡 1–2yr, 🔴 >2yr, 💀 archived) exposes maintenance status at a glance
• Entries span C++, Python, Julia, and MATLAB without language favoritism
• Star counts attached to each repo let you gauge community adoption instantly
• Points to a dedicated physics-engine comparison doc for deeper evaluation

Verdict

Worth bookmarking if you are building or researching robots and need to survey the open-source landscape before committing to a physics engine or planning library. Purely a curation effort—do not expect code, benchmarks, or tutorials here.