Pertaining to [http://www.orocos.org/ Orocos]: Open Realtime Control Services/Open Robot Control Software

Depends on: [http://gcc.gnu.org/libstdc++/ Std C++] (libstdc++), [http://www.boost.org/ Boost], [http://xml.apache.org/#xerces Xerces 2.1] (XML parsers).

Boost is cool.  Core group were involved in the C++ Standard Template Library.
And some of the of the Boost libraries will be in future C++ Standards.
Boost uses/extends the Generic Programming concepts used in STL.

Orocos Has a good related projects list.

Integration between RTAI and TAO and ACE is also part of the ongoing work towards a hard realtime distributed control infastructure based on CORBA.

Control Kernel [http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~psoetens/orocos-packages/orocos-control-kernel.html design and programming interface].
[http://www.orocos.org/documents/motconframe.pdf Motion Control Framework]: The design of a generic kernel.

Many on the documents can be accessed from the download page http://www.orocos.org/download.php