I love MATLAB and have had a long and fruitful engagement with The MathWorks, and that will continue into the future. It has always been ironic that these tools are free (as in beer) but you need to have paid software, MATLAB, in order to run it. Thanks also to those who have supported this endeavour, and the very small number of people who have contributed code. It has been a real delight to meet so many people (when we used to travel) who have found these tools useful in their robotics career. I never expected it to become as big a thing as it did, it started as a small set of simple tools to help me do my PhD research.
The first version of the toolbox was written in 1994, and after various refactorings now exists as three open-source toolboxes:Ģ6 years is an eternity for software and I thank all those who have used them for their interest and kind words. There will be two future editions of the book Robotics, Vision & Control: one supported by MathWorks robotics and computer vision toolboxes, and one supported by the new Python toolboxes.There are new toolboxes in Python, available now, which provide much of the functionality of the toolboxes listed above.The source code will remain open and free (as in speech), just no longer maintained. The Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB ®, Machine Vision Toolbox for MATLAB and Spatial Math Toolbox for MATLAB will reach end of life in January 2022.