What is peekabot?

peekabot is a distributed real-time 3D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily - using visualization as a  debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Our goal is to provide a flexible tool that will cater to the vast majority of a roboticist's visualization needs, yet is easy to use. Typical scenarios include visualization of simulations, data display from real robots and monitoring of remotely deployed robots.

To enable remote data visualization, peekabot uses a distributed client-server architecture. All the gory details of networking is handled by the client library, used by your programs.

Supported platforms

peekabot was designed with platform indepedence in mind, and has been used on both Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Although unverified, it should build on other platforms as well, such as Windows with mingw (not recommended unless you have previous experience with mingw).

License

peekabot is released under a mix of the Boost Software License version 1.0 and the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or, at your option, any later version.

The parts your program has to link with, the peekabot client library, is licensed exclusively under the permissive Boost Software License, which enables unrestricted use of peekabot in commercial applications, for example.

Looking for robotics models?

We maintain a model repository for robotics in our wiki, where you can share models for common robotics hardware with others.

17731242157156model-repo.png

News

peekabot 0.7.2 released

peekabot 0.7.2 has been released, today the 27th of October 2009. It is a bug fix only release, including fixes to make peekabot build and run on Windows.

Posted by staffan on Oct 27, 2009

peekabot 0.7.1 released

peekabot 0.7.1 has been released, today the 7th of September 2009. It fixes a compilation error when using Boost 1.40.

Posted by staffan on Sep 07, 2009

peekabot 0.7.0 released

This release contains a number of important, previously unreleased, bug fixes, improved Windows compatibility, a rebuilt rendering engine that's both faster and less hungry for memory in general, and more.

Posted by staffan on Aug 21, 2009