Tasks

Tasks is library for real time control of robots and kinematic trees using constrained optimization. It has been used extensively to control humanoid robots such as HOAP-3, HRP-2, HRP-4 and Atlas.

Documentation

Features:

• Support Kinematics Tree with Revolute/Prismatic/Spherical/Free/Planar/Cylindrical joints
• Dynamic motion (motion must fulfill the equation of motion)
• Contact forces in friction cones
• Static contacts
• Articular position, speed and torque limits
• Collision avoidance
• Multi-robot contact (can solve problems involving multiple robots in contact)
• Tasks:
• Posture target (articular position target, mandatory if you want avoid singularity issues)
• Link Position/Orientation target
• Link Velocity target
• Center of Mass (CoM) target
• Momentum target
• Contact force target

To make sure that Tasks works as intended, unit tests are available for each algorithm.

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

An online documentation can be found online.

Installing

Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 binary ppa install

Use the multi-contact-unstable ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pierre-gergondet+ppa/multi-contact-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libtasks-dev libtasks-qld-doc

Homebrew OS X install

Install from the command line using Homebrew:

# install homebrew package manager
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
# install caskroom application manager
brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
# tap homebrew-science package repository
brew tap homebrew/science
# tap ahundt-robotics repository
brew tap ahundt/robotics
# install tasks and all its dependencies
brew install tasks

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
• RBDyn
• eigen-qld
• eigen-lssol (Optional, if you have the LSSOL licence ask us this library)
• sch-core

For Python bindings:

• Cython = 0.25
• Eigen3ToPython
• sch-core-python

Building

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

Where the main options are:

• -DCMAKE_BUIlD_TYPE=Release Build in Release mode
• -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=some/path/to/install default is /usr/local
• -DPYTHON_BINDING=ON Build the python binding
• -DUNIT_TESTS=ON Build unit tests.
• -DPYTHON_DEB_LAYOUT=OFF install python library in site-packages (ON will install in dist-packages)

Pulling git subtree

To update cmake or .travis directory with their upstream git repository:

git fetch git://github.com/jrl-umi3218/jrl-cmakemodules.git master
git subtree pull --prefix cmake git://github.com/jrl-umi3218/jrl-cmakemodules.git master --squash

git fetch git://github.com/jrl-umi3218/jrl-travis.git master
git subtree pull --prefix .travis git://github.com/jrl-umi3218/jrl-travis.git master --squash