Hi, I'm Peter Corke
Distinguished Professor Emeritus at QUT | Principal Advisor at The Useful Robot Company | Technical Advisor to Emesent
I am a robotics researcher, educator, and the creator of widely used open-source robotics toolboxes and the book Robotics, Vision & Control, Springer 2023. My work focuses on providing accessible, robust software for robotics, machine vision and control simulation to support both the academic community and industry professionals. More details on my personal website at petercorke.com.
- Open-Source Toolboxes:
- Maintaining and expanding my core Python ecosystem, see below.
- Community & Leadership:
- IEEE RAS AdCom for 2026-28 (elected at large)
- Journal advisory boards: IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics advisory board; IEEE Transactions on Robotics & Automation Practice; Int. J. Robotics Research
- Program co-chair for IEEE IROS 2028 conference in Sydney.
The following Python packages are personal passion projects. The lineage of the Robotics and Machine Vision toolboxes goes back to MATLAB versions I open-sourced in the 1990s to support my PhD research. For a deeper dive into the history of this work and the growth of the robotic vision community in Australia, you can watch the documentary Peter Corke: Australian Robotic Vision.
| Package | Monthly Downloads | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Robotics Toolbox for Python | Core robotics functionality for kinematics, dynamics, and trajectory generation for serial-link manipulators and mobile robots. | |
| Machine Vision Toolbox | An object-oriented API for machine vision, bridging raw pixel manipulation with spatial reasoning and 3D vision. | |
| bdsim | A block diagram simulation environment for continuous-time and dynamic systems, heavily integrated with spatial maths. |
| Package | Monthly Downloads | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| ansitable | A utility for creating clean, beautifully formatted tables in the terminal. | |
| Spatial Maths Toolbox (SMTB) † | Comprehensive tools for 2D and 3D spatial mathematics (rotations, transforms, quaternions, SO/SE classes). | |
| pgraph | Classes for creating, visualising and planning over mathematical graphs. | |
| spatialgeometry ‡ | Foundational 3D geometry primitives and collision checking (used by RTB and Swift). | |
| Swift ‡ | A browser-based, lightweight 3D simulation environment built specifically to visualise RTB models. |
- † now part of the RAI Institute open-source ecosystem
- ‡ authored by Jesse Haviland
| Package | Summary |
|---|---|
| RVC3-python | Support code and environment setup for the textbook Robotics, Vision & Control (3rd edition). |
Good tools, need documentation, and that needs good documentation tools. I'm a bit fan of Sphinx
| Package | Summary |
|---|---|
| rvc-notation | A Sphinx extension that executes Python code blocks during documentation builds and inserts the output directly into the generated docs. |
| sphinx-pyrunblock | A Sphinx extension that executes Python code blocks during documentation builds and inserts the output directly into the generated docs. |