According to the peekabot project's Web site: "peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D 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.

We don't yet have robots quite as advanced as Star Wars' C3PO or some of the robots seen in the sci-fi flick Blade Runner, but did you know that there is an open source effort underway to produce them? Well, sort of. RobotCub is a site that houses an open source software repository and many other resources that open source developers are using to advance a humanoid baby robot, dubbed iCub.

The personal robot market will be worth $15 billion annually by 2015, according to an ABI report. Most personal robots shipping today use proprietary OSes, although Linux is slowly migrating from the commercial to the consumer robot market, according to an ABI analyst.

Today's nascent robotics market has engendered about 10 general-purpose software development frameworks, including nine supporting Linux. This article surveys seven aimed at service robots, and three at industrial robots, concluding with an analysis of market trends likely to shape tomorrow's robotics software landscape.