Open-source credits
Built on the shoulders of giants
RobotForge is an integration project as much as a product. The simulator, CAD, and robot viewer pages exist because hundreds of researchers and hackers spent years building the pieces in the open. This page documents every one we lean on, with honest license notes.
If we missed your project or got the attribution wrong, email us and we’ll fix it the same week.
Inspirations
Projects whose ideas we rebuilt natively. We did not vendor their code — we wrote our own implementations against our stack and credit the original thinking here. Where licenses are compatible, you may also see deeper ports land in future versions.
- fan-ziqi/robot_viewerApache-2.0
Browser-based URDF/MJCF/USD viewer with joint manipulation. The interaction model — drop a file, drag joint sliders, scrub the kinematic chain — informed our /viewer page.
applied in /viewer
Universal browser viewer for URDF, MJCF, and OpenUSD. Same problem space as our /viewer — proof a single in-browser robot file dropper is a real thing students want.
applied in /viewer
- ttktjmt/mjswanApache-2.0
MuJoCo + ONNX policies in the browser, click to load a model. The 'policy bank' chip row in /simulator borrows that pattern (we ship JS controllers; ONNX playback is on the roadmap).
applied in /simulator
Local Python framework where Claude/Codex edit build123d source files to produce STEP/STL/URDF. The chat-first CAD UX in /cad's AI assistant is its philosophical descendant — except ours runs entirely in the browser and emits ops on our own scene schema.
applied in /cad
- Adam-CAD/CADAMGPL-3.0
Text-to-CAD web app via OpenSCAD WASM + Claude. License is incompatible with our MIT site, so we did not vendor any of it — the parameter-slider UX did inform our roadmap, however.
- ferdous-alam/GenCADUnspecified
Image-conditioned CAD generation research (transformer + diffusion). PyTorch-only, server-side, and missing a license file at the time of writing — we did not bundle code. We're tracking it for the future image-to-part feature.
Browser parametric CAD via JavaScript code. Validated that 'CAD as scripting' is a viable UX for hardware hackers — informed the /cad scripting console.
applied in /cad
- gkjohnson/urdf-loaders (NASA JPL)Apache-2.0
Reference URDF parser & three.js loader. Cross-checked our parser's joint/origin/axis handling against this project.
applied in /viewer
- zalo/mujoco_wasmApache-2.0
MuJoCo compiled to WebAssembly. On the roadmap as a second physics backend alongside Rapier in /simulator.
Libraries we ship
These dependencies actually ship in your browser when you visit the site. Each has its own license and copyright.
- Three.jsMIT
WebGL rendering for /cad, /viewer, and /simulator viewports.
React renderer over Three.js — every 3D viewport on the site.
OrbitControls, Bounds, Environment helpers used in every viewport.
- Rapier 3DApache-2.0
Rust→WASM rigid-body physics. The engine behind /simulator.
- ReplicadMIT
OpenCASCADE-based modeller for STEP export from /cad.
- Manifold-3dApache-2.0
Robust mesh booleans for CSG inside /cad.
VS Code's editor in the browser — drives the /simulator code panel.
- Next.jsMIT
App framework hosting every page on the site.
- Tailwind CSSMIT
Styling framework.
A note on rebranding vs. reuse
Several inspiration projects are licensed under Apache-2.0 or MIT, both of which permit verbatim inclusion. We chose to rebuild rather than vendor for three reasons: smaller bundle size, consistent UX with the rest of RobotForge, and a single source-of-truth for our scene and robot data models.
Where a project is GPL-licensed (e.g. CADAM), we explicitly avoided touching the source so the site can stay MIT. Where a project has no license file (GenCAD), we did not bundle anything either — only public ideas from the paper.