Submit Your Contribution {#contrib}

We welcome external contributions. We want to make the process of contributing code as easy as possible. To this end we came up with the following guidelines:

  1. It is possible that your code simply uses OMPL as a dependency. In that case, bundling that code with OMPL might not make sense, but we can still list it on our web site, e.g., on the page listing robotics software that includes support for OMPL.

  2. If you would like to contribute code to OMPL, be it new algorithms or fixes / optimizations, we welcome contributions via pull requests on Github.

  3. In the unlikely event that the submitted code is of poor quality, we will try to suggest the changes necessary to include the contribution in OMPL, and postpone merging until the necessary changes are made. In almost all cases there will be minor issues. GitHub makes it very easy to have a two-way conversation with the OMPL developers about the code. Common issues that are typically easy to fix include: const-correctness of methods and their arguments, missing/incorrect documentation, memory leaks, and gross deviations form the OMPL style guide.

  4. All source code files must have a BSD license at the top of each file plus the names of the authors. Also, the code should contain Doxygen-style documentation, so that the API documentation can be automatically generated and included in the OMPL web site. Finally, the code should be formatted according to the OMPL style guide.

  5. We are open to discussing a guest blog post for the OMPL blog that describes how OMPL has accelerated your research. This can be done whether you contribute code to OMPL or not.