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

Pinocchio instantiates state-of-the-art Rigid Body Algorithms for poly-articulated systems based on revisited Roy Featherstone's algorithms. Besides, 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 contexts (biomechanics, computer graphics, etc.) It is built upon Eigen for linear algebra and FCL for collision detection. Pinocchio comes with a Python interface for fast code prototyping.

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

Pinocchio features

Pinocchio is fast:

C++ template library,
cache friendly,
automatic code generation support.

Pinocchio implements rigid body dynamics algorithms:

forward kinematics and its analytical derivatives,
forward/inverse dynamics and their analytical derivatives,
centroidal dynamics and its analytical derivatives.

Pinocchio is flexible:

header only,
C++11 compliant.

Pinocchio is multi-thread friendly.
Pinocchio is reliable and extensively tested (unit-tests, simulations and real robotics applications).
Pinocchio is supported on Mac Os X and many Linux distributions (See build status here).

Ongoing developments

If you want to follow the current developments, you can directly refer to the devel branch.

Installation

Pinocchio can be easily installed on various Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) and Unix distributions (Mac OS X, BSD, etc.). 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 coming with a large bunch of tutorials aiming at introducing the basic tools for robotics control. The content of the tutorials are described here and the source code of these tutorials is located here.

Citing Pinocchio

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

@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--2019}
     }

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 and Issues

You have a question or an issue? You may either directly open a new issue or use the mailing list pinocchio@laas.fr.

Credits

The following people have been involved in the development of Pinocchio:

Justin Carpentier (INRIA): main developer and manager of the project
Nicolas Mansard (LAAS-CNRS): project instructor
Guilhem Saurel (LAAS-CNRS): continuous integration and deployment
Joseph Mirabel (LAAS-CNRS): Lie groups support
Antonio El Khoury (Wandercraft): bug fixes
Gabriele Buondono (LAAS-CNRS): bug fixes
Florian Valenza (Astek): core developments and FCL support

If you have taken part to the development of Pinocchio, feel free to add your name and contribution here.

Acknowledgments

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

qqfly / pinocchio