It provides many command-line tools to work with robots and planners, and the run-time core is small enough to be used inside controllers and bigger frameworks.

The robot extensions include: The core of OpenRAVE design focuses on offering interfaces and implementations of motion planning algorithms.

Most of the planning algorithm implementations are for robot arms and use sampling to explore the task configuration spaces.

OpenRAVE's main focus is to increase the reliability of motion planning systems to make integration easy.

OpenRAVE was founded by Rosen Diankov at the Quality of Life Technology Center in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute.