Kindr - Kinematics and Dynamics for Robotics

Authors: Christian Gehring, C. Dario Bellicoso, Michael Bloesch, Remo Diethelm, Peter Fankhauser, Paul Furgale, Michael Neunert, Hannes Sommer
Maintainer: Remo Diethelm, rdiethelm@anybotics.com
Affiliation: ANYbotics

This projected was initially developed at ETH Zurich (Autonomous Systems Lab & Robotic Systems Lab).

This work is conducted as part of ANYmal Research, a community to advance legged robotics.

The source code is released under a BSD 3-Clause license.

Documentation

Online

Impatient individuals can directly download the cheat sheet.

See also section 'Building the documentation' below.

Changelog

Kindr 1.0.0

Simplified header include #include <kindr/Core> is provided.
Kindr is now strongly dependent on Eigen.
All sub namespaces have been removed. (e.g. kindr::rotations::eigen_impl -> kindr::)
The implementations of rotations and time derivatives have been simplified (Passive, Hamiltonian).
- Active typedefs (e.g. RotationQuaternionAD) have been removed and simpler ones (e.g. RotationQuaternionD) have been introduced.
- Note that the functionality of some operators changed! Please check the cheat sheet to understand what is implemented.
- Some hints on what needs to be changed from kindr 0.0.1:
  - rotation.setFromVectors(v1, v2) -> rotation.setFromVectors(v2, v1)
  - C_BI.boxPlus(dt * B_w_IB) -> C_BI.boxPlus(dt * C_IB * B_w_IB)
  - C_BI.boxMinus(dt * B_w_IB) -> -C_BI.boxMinus(dt * B_w_IB)
  - Euler angles probably have to be negated.
Conversion methods between ROS and kindr have been moved to the package kindr_ros.
Concatenation of Homogeneous Transformation is now implemented.
Short typedefs are provided for Homogeneous Transformation: HomTransformQuatD, HomTransformMatrixD.
Jacobian of exponential map is implemented.
Unit tests based on gtest are provided to test the convention of other software packages.
- Gazebo (gazebo::math::Quaternion) uses the same convention as kindr.
- ROS TF (tf::Quaternion and tf::Matrix3x3) uses the same convention as kindr.
- RBDL's RigidBodyDynamics::Math::SpatialTransform uses the same convention as kindr, whereas RBDL's RigidBodyDynamics::Math::Quaternion concatenates differently and its conversion to a rotation matrix is inverted.

Requirements

Eigen 3.2.0 (Older versions might also work)
GCC 4.7 is required at the minimum.
CMake 2.8.3 is required at the minimum.

Building

Building with cmake

Install the library with CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DUSE_CMAKE=true
sudo make install

Note that USE_CMAKE defaults to true if catkin is not installed.

Uninstall the library with:

cd build
sudo make uninstall

Kindr can be included in your cmake project. Add the following to your CmakeLists.txt:

find_package(kindr)
include_directories(${kindr_INCLUDE_DIRS})

Building with catkin

Build kindr with catkin:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone git@github.com:anybotics/kindr.git
catkin_make_isolated -C ~/catkin_ws

or with catkin command line tools:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone git@github.com:anybotics/kindr.git
catkin build -w ~/catkin_ws kindr

Kindr can be included in your catkin project with: Add the following to your CMakeLists.txt:

find_package(catkin COMPONENTS kindr)
include_directories(${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS})

And to your package.xml:

<package>
  <build_depend>kindr</build_depend>
</package>

Building the documentation

Build the documentation with Doxygen:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make kindr_doc

The doxygen documentation can be found here:

build/doc/html/index.html

Building unit tests with gtest

GTests are only built if the folder gtest exists in the root folder.

Download and use GTest:

wget https://github.com/google/googletest/archive/release-1.7.0.zip
unzip release-1.7.0.zip
ln -s googletest-release-1.7.0 gtest
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DUSE_CMAKE=true -DBUILD_TEST=true
make