Orocos KDL

A C++ kinematics and dynamics library from the Orocos project, long a default choice for kinematics in ROS.

KDL is part of Orocos, an open-source robot control software project originally developed at institutions including KU Leuven in Belgium. It's implemented in C++, with Python bindings also available. KDL models a robot as a kinematic chain of links connected by joints, and provides solvers for forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, the Jacobian matrix, and inverse dynamics. It's used extremely widely across the ROS ecosystem: kdl_parser converts a URDF into a KDL model, robot_state_publisher uses it to compute the pose of every link, and MoveIt's default kinematics plugin is also built on it. Its numerical inverse-kinematics solver tends to fail near joint limits, which is why it's often replaced by TRAC-IK; newer projects are also increasingly switching to Pinocchio.

ExampleAfter a robot arm publishes its joint angles in ROS, robot_state_publisher calls KDL to compute the pose of the end effector and every link, then publishes them to the TF transform tree.

Also called

KDL, Orocos Kinematics and Dynamics Library

Related

Forward Kinematics (FK) · Inverse Kinematics (IK) · Jacobian Matrix · TRAC-IK · MoveIt Motion Planning Framework · robot_state_publisher

Sources

Orocos KDL 官方页面 (Chinese)
orocos/orocos_kinematics_dynamics (GitHub)