Needs for robotics in manufacturing, military, and security systems was the motivation for creating Umbra. Robotic systems must move and navigate in a physical world, communicate, and interact with humans. Sandia’s and other organization’s robotics programs utilize Umbra as a planning tool for modeling and simulating robotic systems, integrating machine vision control, and training operators on the use of robotic systems.
Umbra was created to allow engineers and analysts to break complex system software problems into collections of manageable pieces, or modules that can be tested independently and then efficiently combined into a system. Umbra provides a software framework, base classes, and an interactive script-level interface that facilitates efficient and effective code development, debugging, reuse, experimentation, and deployment. It includes an extensible core set of libraries for efficiently loading, representing, displaying, and analyzing 3D geometries. Umbra is delivered in its developer form with an extensive library of reusable modules and application templates to support a wide variety of applications.