Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit

Abstract

Designing control algorithms for complex dynamic systems is a challenging and time consuming process. It often requires deriving nonlinear differential equations, formulating optimization problems, and solving numerous small, but tedious, problems, such as inverse kinematics, forward simulation, inverse dynamics, or Jacobian matrix computation. To streamline the process of controller design, we introduced an open-source, cross-platform toolkit, called DART, for rapid development of kinematics and dynamics applications in computer animation and robotics. DART (Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit), one of the default physics engines in Gazebo, provides seamless integration with robotic simulators in the ROS environment. In contrast to many popular physics engines that view the simulator as a black box, DART gives full access to internal kinematic and dynamic quantities, such as the mass matrix, Coriolis and centrifugal forces, and transformation matrices and their derivatives. DART also provides efficient computation of Jacobian matrices for arbitrary body points and coordinate frames.

In this talk, I will give an introduction to DART and demonstrate how complicated problems can be implemented using only a few lines of code in DART. I will also show how we use DART to make an Atlas robot walk, a Shadow Hand manipulate objects, a virtual human learn gymnastics, and a variety of aquatic creatures swim in simulated fluid.