What Is Flexiv PDK?

Flexiv PDK (Planning Development Kit) is a client SDK for building robotic applications on top of a running PDK server.

What the PDK provides

The Flexiv PDK provides four groups of functionality:

  1. Scene setup. Build a workcell containing robot systems, objects, cameras and named coordinate frames, and query or move anything in it.

  2. Surface finish. Create a tool path on an object (from CAD edges or faces, or from a mesh) and compute the robot motion that follows it.

  3. Point-to-point motion. Plan collision-free robot motion between joint configurations or saved target poses, optionally carrying a grasped object.

  4. Perception. Capture camera images and point clouds, reconstruct the scene, and process meshes.

Python and C++ both provide all four.

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────┐          gRPC (HTTP/2)         ┌──────────────────────┐
│  Your application         │  ───────────────────────────▶  │  PDK server           │
│                           │                                │                       │
│  Python  flexiv.pdk       │   requests / responses         │  workcells, scene,    │
│  C++     flexiv::pdk      │  ◀───────────────────────────  │  kinematics, planning,│
│  CLI     pdk-scene        │   server-streamed events       │  perception, licensing│
└──────────────────────────┘                                └──────────┬───────────┘
                                                                       │ RDK
                                                                       ▼
                                                               Flexiv robots, cameras

  • The server owns all state: the active workcell, the scene, saved paths and licenses. It listens on localhost:50052 by default.

  • The client SDK is thin. It opens one gRPC channel and gives you a stub for each service. Requests and responses are Protocol Buffers messages generated from the .proto files in proto/flexiv/pdk/.

  • Helpers are layered on top: conversions to NumPy, Eigen and Three.js, a reconnecting subscriber for streamed scene events, and license-file handling.

Where to go next