Secondary Development (custom development on SDK)

Writing your own programs against a vendor's SDK or interface to customize a robot, without touching its firmware.

“Secondary development” (二次开发) is a common phrase in Chinese engineering circles for building custom functionality on top of a vendor's published SDK, API, or ROS interface, without modifying the vendor's underlying firmware. For embodied-AI research, whether a purchased robot supports secondary development matters a great deal: only if you can read joint states and camera data, and send joint or velocity commands, can you deploy a policy you trained yourself. Because of this, many manufacturers sell a standard version alongside an EDU (research/education) version with a more open low-level interface — the two differ in both how much access they give and in price.

ExampleBuy the EDU edition of the Unitree G1, use the Unitree SDK to read joint angles and send torque commands, and deploy a reinforcement-learning walking policy trained in simulation onto the real robot.

Also called

open interface, SDK development

Related

Software Development Kit · Unitree SDK2 · EDU Edition · Driver (Device Driver) · Robot Operating System 2 · Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)

Sources

Software development kit - Wikipedia
Unitree 开发者文档 (Chinese)