Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit

Two decades of open-source robotics — since 2005

Documentation · Tutorials · API Reference · Examples · Applications

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What is MRPT?

MRPT is a well-established C++ framework for mobile robotics, originally developed in 2005 at the University of Málaga and actively maintained to this day. Over the years, contributions from the community have evolved it into a robust, modular toolkit widely used in both academic research and industry.

MRPT 3.0 is a major refactoring that modernises the build system (colcon-based modular packages), cleans up the public API, and aligns with modern C++17 standards while preserving the data structures and algorithms at the core of MRPT.

Key capabilities

Area	What's included
SLAM	MonteCarlo Localization, RBPF, pose-graph optimization
Geometry	SE(2)/SE(3) Lie groups, rigid body transforms, point clouds
Probabilistic	Kalman filters, particle filters, PDFs over poses & maps
Maps	Occupancy grids, point maps, landmark maps, voxel maps
Sensors	LiDAR, stereo/RGB-D cameras, IMU, GPS, Velodyne, …
Visualization	3-D scene graph (mrpt::viz), GUI windows, plot widgets
Navigation	Reactive nav, path planning, PTG-based obstacle avoidance
Python	pybind11 bindings for all major modules

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Getting started

Install from ROS repositories

# ROS 1 (deprecated)
sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-mrpt2

# ROS 2
sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-mrpt-*

ROS2 build status for mrpt3

Distro	Build dev	Release
ROS 2 Humble (u22.04)
ROS 2 Jazzy (u24.04)
ROS 2 Kilted (u24.04)
ROS 2 Lyrical (u26.04)
ROS 2 Rolling (u26.04)

Binary package build for amd64 and arm64 architectures:

Package	ROS 2 Humble BinBuild	ROS 2 Jazzy BinBuild	ROS 2 Kilted BinBuild	ROS 2 Lyrical BinBuild	ROS 2 Rolling BinBuild
mrpt_core
mrpt_io
mrpt_serialization
mrpt_system
mrpt_rtti
mrpt_containers
mrpt_typemeta
mrpt_random
mrpt_config
mrpt_expr
mrpt_math
mrpt_poses
mrpt_tfest
mrpt_bayes
mrpt_obs
mrpt_topography
mrpt_maps
mrpt_graphs
mrpt_opengl
mrpt_img
mrpt_gui
mrpt_nav
mrpt_kinematics
mrpt_slam
mrpt_hwdrivers
mrpt_common
mrpt_comms
mrpt_libapps_cli
mrpt_libapps_gui
mrpt_apps_cli
mrpt_apps_gui

Install (Ubuntu/Debian)

sudo apt install libmrpt-dev mrpt-apps

Check your distro version at Ubuntu / Debian. For a more recent build, use the nightly PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:joseluisblancoc/mrpt
sudo apt install libmrpt-dev mrpt-apps

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/MRPT/mrpt.git --recursive

Install build dependencies with rosdep (recommended, works even without ROS installed):

sudo apt install python3-rosdep
sudo rosdep init   # only once per machine
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths . --ignore-src -r -y

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