Crocoddyl is an optimal control library for robot control under contact sequence. Its solver is based on an efficient Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) algorithm. Crocoddyl computes optimal trajectories along to optimal feedback gains. It uses Pinocchio for fast computation of robot dynamics and its analytical derivatives.
The source code is released under the BSD 3-Clause license.
Authors: Carlos Mastalli and Rohan Budhiraja
Instructors: Nicolas Mansard
With additional support from the Gepetto team at LAAS-CNRS and MEMMO project. For more details see Section Credits
If you want to follow the current developments, you can directly refer to the devel branch.
Crocoddyl can be easily installed on various Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) and Unix distributions (Mac OS X, BSD, etc.).
Crocoddyl is versatible:
- various optimal control solvers (DDP, FDDP, BoxDDP, etc) - single and multi-shooting methods
- analytical and sparse derivatives
- geometrical systems friendly (with SE(3) manifold support)
- handle autonomous and nonautomous dynamical systems
- numerical differentiation support
Crocoddyl is efficient and flexible:
- cache friendly,
- multi-thread friendly
- Python bindings (including models and solvers abstractions)
- C++98/11/14/17/20 compliant
- extensively tested
You can install this package through robotpkg. robotpkg is a package manager tailored for robotics softwares.
It greatly simplifies the release of new versions along with the management of their dependencies.
You just need to add the robotpkg apt repository to your sources.list and then use sudo apt install robotpkg-py27-crocoddyl
(or py3X
for python 3.X, depending on your system):
If you have never added robotpkg as a softwares repository, please follow first the instructions from 1 to 3; otherwise, go directly to instruction 4. Those instructions are similar to the installation procedures presented in http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/debian.html.
- Add robotpkg as source repository to apt:
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/robotpkg.list <<EOF
deb [arch=amd64] http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/wip/packages/debian/pub $(lsb_release -sc) robotpkg
deb [arch=amd64] http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub $(lsb_release -sc) robotpkg
EOF
- Register the authentication certificate of robotpkg:
curl http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/robotpkg.key | sudo apt-key add -
- You need to run at least once apt update to fetch the package descriptions:
sudo apt-get update
- The installation of Crocoddyl:
sudo apt install robotpkg-py27-crocoddyl # for Python 2
sudo apt install robotpkg-py35-crocoddyl # for Python 3
Finally you will need to configure your environment variables, e.g.:
export PATH=/opt/openrobots/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/openrobots/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/openrobots/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PYTHONPATH=/opt/openrobots/lib/python2.7/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH
Crocoddyl is c++ library with Python bindings for versatile and fast prototyping. It has the following dependencies:
- pinocchio
- example-robot-data (optional for examples, install Python loaders)
- gepetto-viewer-corba (optional for display)
- jupyter (optional for notebooks)
- matplotlib (optional for examples)
You can run examples, unit-tests and benchmarks from your build dir:
cd build
make test
make -s examples-quadrupedal_gaits INPUT="display plot" # enable display and plot
make -s benchmarks-quadrupedal_gaits INPUT="100 walk" # number of trials ; type of gait
Alternatively, you cansee the 3D result and/or graphs of your run examples, you can use
export CROCODDYL_DISPLAY=1
export CROCODDYL_PLOT=1
If you want to learn about Crocoddyl, take a look at the Jupyter notebooks. Start in the following order.
- examples/notebooks/unicycle_towards_origin.ipynb
- examples/notebooks/cartpole_swing_up.ipynb
- examples/notebooks/arm_manipulation.ipynb
- examples/notebooks/bipedal_walking.ipynb
- examples/notebooks/introduction_to_crocoddyl.ipynb
To cite Crocoddyl in your academic research, please use the following bibtex lines:
@unpublished{mastalli2020crocoddyl,
author={Mastalli, Carlos and Budhiraja, Rohan and Merkt, Wolfgang and Saurel, Guilhem and Hammoud, Bilal
and Naveau, Maximilien and Carpentier, Justin and Vijayakumar, Sethu and Mansard, Nicolas},
title={{Crocoddyl: An Efficient and Versatile Framework for Multi-Contact Optimal Control}},
year={2020}
}
and the following one to reference this website:
@misc{crocoddylweb,
author = {Carlos Mastalli, Rohan Budhiraja and Nicolas Mansard and others},
title = {Crocoddyl: a fast and flexible optimal control library for robot control under contact sequence},
howpublished = {https://gepgitlab.laas.fr/loco-3d/crocoddyl/wikis/home},
year = {2019}
}
The rest of the publications describes different component of Crocoddyl:
- C. Mastalli et al. Crocoddyl: An Efficient and Versatile Framework for Multi-Contact Optimal Control, pre-print, 2020
- R. Budhiraja, J. Carpentier, C. Mastalli and N. Mansard. Differential Dynamic Programming for Multi-Phase Rigid Contact Dynamics, IEEE RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (ICHR), 2018
- Y. Tassa, N. Mansard, E. Todorov. Control-Limited Differential Dynamic Programming, IEEE International Conference on Automation and Robotics (ICRA), 2014
- R. Budhiraja, J. Carpentier and N. Mansard. Dynamics Consensus between Centroidal and Whole-Body Models for Locomotion of Legged Robots, IEEE International Conference on Automation and Robotics (ICRA), 2019
You have a question or an issue? You may either directly open a new issue or use the mailing list crocoddyl@laas.fr.
The following people have been involved in the development of Crocoddyl:
- Carlos Mastalli (University of Edinburgh): main developer and manager of the project
- Nicolas Mansard (LAAS-CNRS): project instructor
- Rohan Budhiraja (LAAS-CNRS): features extension
- Justin Carpentier (INRIA): efficient analytical rigid-body dynamics derivatives
- Maximilien Naveau (MPI): unit-test support
- Guilhem Saurel (LAAS-CNRS): continuous integration and deployment
- Wolfgang Merkt (University of Edinburgh): feature extension and debugging
- Josep MartĂ Saumell (UPC): feature extension
- Bilal Hammoud (MPI): features extension
The development of Pinocchio is supported by the EU MEMMO project, the Gepetto team @LAAS-CNRS, and the Statistical Machine Learning and Motor Control Group @University of Edinburgh.