Pinocchio: a C++ library for efficient Rigid Multi-body Dynamics computations

Pinocchio instatiates state-of-the-art Rigid Body Algotithms for poly-articulated systems based on revisited Roy Featherstone's algorithms. In addition, Pinocchio instantiates analytical derivatives of the main Rigid-Body Algorithms like the Recursive Newton-Euler Algorithms or the Articulated-Body Algorithm. Pinocchio is first tailored for legged robotics applications, but it can be used in extra contextes. It is built upon Eigen for linear algebra and FCL for collision detections. Pinocchio comes with a Python interface for fast code protyping.

Pinocchio is now at the hearth of various robotics softwares as the Stack-of-Tasks or the Humanoid Path Planner.

Installation

Pinocchio can be easily installed on various Linux and Unix distributions. Please refer to the installation procedure.

Examples

We provide some basic examples on how to use Pinocchio in Python in the examples/python directory.

Tutorials

Pinocchio is comming with a large bunch of tutorials aiming at introducting the basic tools for robotics control. The content of the tutorials are described here and the code source of these tutorials is located here.

Dependencies

Pinocchio depends on few additional packages which have to be available on your machine.

Build dependencies

• cmake (version >= 2.6)
• pkg-config
• Boost with components unit_test_framework
• G++/CLANG

Core dependencies

• Eigen3 (version >= 3.0.5)
• Boost with components filesystem

Optional dependencies

• urdfdom (version >= 0.2)
• LUA 5.1
• FCL

Python bindings

• Python 2.7 or 3.0
• Numpy
• EigenPy
• Boost Python

Citing Pinocchio

To cite Pinocchio in your academic research, please use the following bibtex line:

@misc{pinocchioweb,
      author = {Justin Carpentier and Florian Valenza and Nicolas Mansard and others},
      title = {Pinocchio: fast forward and inverse dynamics for poly-articulated systems},
      howpublished = {https://stack-of-tasks.github.io/pinocchio},
      year = {2015--2018}
     }

The algorithms for the analytical derivatives of rigid-body dynamics algorithms are detailed here:

@inproceedings{carpentier2018analytical,
  title={Analytical Derivatives of Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms},
  author={Carpentier, Justin and Mansard, Nicolas},
  booktitle={Robotics: Science and Systems},
  year={2018}
}

Questions

You need to ask a question? You may either directly post a new issue or use the mailing list pinocchio@laas.fr

Acknowledgments

The development of Pinocchio is supported by the Gepetto team @LAAS-CNRS.