RBDyn

RBDyn provides a set of classes and functions to model the dynamics of rigid body systems.

This implementation is based on Roy Featherstone Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms book and other state of the art publications.

Installing

Ubuntu LTS (16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, 24.04)

You must first setup our package mirror:

curl -1sLf \
  'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/mc-rtc/stable/setup.deb.sh' \
  | sudo -E bash

You can also choose the head mirror which will have the latest version of this package:

curl -1sLf \
  'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/mc-rtc/head/setup.deb.sh' \
  | sudo -E bash

You can then install the package:

sudo apt install librbdyn-dev python-rbdyn python3-rbdyn

vcpkg

Use the registry available here

Homebrew OS X install

Install from the command line using Homebrew:

# Use mc-rtc tap
brew tap mc-rtc/mc-rtc
# install RBDyn and its Python bindings
brew install rbdyn

Manually build from source

Dependencies

To compile you need the following tools:

• [Git]()
• [CMake]() >= 2.8
• [pkg-config]()
• [doxygen]()
• [g++]() >= 4.7 (for C++11 support)
• Boost >= 1.49
• Eigen >= 3.2
• SpaceVecAlg

For Python bindings:

• Cython >= 0.20
• Eigen3ToPython (to use the python binding)

Building

git clone --recursive https://github.com/jrl-umi3218/RBDyn
cd RBDyn
mkdir _build
cd _build
cmake [options] ..
make && make intall

CMake options

By default, the build will use the python and pip command to install the bindings for the default system version (this behaviour can be used to build the bindings in a given virtualenv). The following options allow to control this behaviour:

• PYTHON_BINDING Build the python binding (ON/OFF, default: ON)
• PYTHON_BINDING_FORCE_PYTHON2: use python2 and pip2 instead of python and pip
• PYTHON_BINDING_FORCE_PYTHON3: use python3 and pip3 instead of python and pip
• PYTHON_BINDING_BUILD_PYTHON2_AND_PYTHON3: builds two sets of bindings one with python2 and pip2, the other with python3 and pip3
• BUILD_TESTING Enable unit tests building (ON/OFF, default: ON)

Arch Linux

You can use the following AUR package.

Documentation

Features:

• Kinematics tree Kinematics and Dynamics algorithm C++11 implementation
• Use Eigen3 and SpaceVecAlg library
• Free, Spherical, Planar, Cylindrical, Revolute, Prismatic joint support
• Translation, Rotation, Vector, CoM, Momentum Jacobian computation
• Inverse Dynamics, Forward Dynamics
• Inverse Dynamic Identification Model (IDIM)
• Kinematics tree body merging/filtering
• Kinematics tree base selection
• Python binding

To make sure that RBDyn works as intended, unit tests are available for each algorithm. Besides, the library has been used extensively to control humanoid robots such as HOAP-3, HRP-2, HRP-4 and Atlas.

A short tutorial is available here.

The SpaceVecAlg and RBDyn tutorial is also a big ressource to understand how to use RBDyn by providing a lot of IPython Notebook that will present real use case.

A doxygen documentation is available online.