CANopen is a high-level communication protocol which also standardizes the behavior of hardware in a number of so-called device profiles, allowing for vendor-independent control of devices.
The IPA CANopen library is a C++ framework for communicating with CANopen motor devices. Most users will use the ROS (Robot Operating System) wrapper (ipa_canopen_ros) provided as part of this repository. However, the library itself (ipa_canopen_core) is completely independent from ROS and therefore can also be used in other contexts.