Software Development Kit

The libraries, interfaces, and examples a manufacturer provides so developers can control a device from code.

An SDK is the full package of development materials a software or hardware maker gives to developers, typically including libraries, API documentation, sample code, drivers, and debugging tools. In robotics, once you’ve bought a robot arm, quadruped, or humanoid, reading its joint states, sending position or torque commands, and pulling images from its camera is usually all done through the manufacturer’s SDK — what’s commonly called building on top of the platform. Most SDKs offer C++ and Python interfaces, and many also ship a ROS / ROS 2 wrapper. How open an SDK is directly determines what you can actually do with the robot — for instance, whether it exposes low-level joint torque control, or only lets you call high-level walking and gesture commands.

ExampleThe Unitree G1 reads out every joint angle and sends motor commands through unitree_sdk2, which is how researchers deploy their own trained locomotion policies on it.

Also called

SDK

Related

Secondary Development (custom development on SDK) · Unitree SDK2 · libfranka / Franka Control Interface (FCI) · Driver (Device Driver) · Robot Operating System 2

Sources

unitree_sdk2 (GitHub)
Franka Robotics 文档：libfranka client library (Chinese)