The Pinocchio C++ library : A fast and flexible implementation of rigid body dynamics algorithms and their analytical derivatives

TLDR

Pinocchio extends standard robotics algorithms by adding features essential for control, planning, and simulation. The paper introduces Pinocchio as an open‑source framework for rigid‑body dynamics and its analytical derivatives, and outlines its key features and efficient design. Pinocchio implements efficient rigid‑body dynamics algorithms and evaluates their performance against RBDL, a widely used robotics framework. Source‑code generation in Pinocchio outperforms state‑of‑the‑art approaches.

Abstract

We introduce Pinocchio, an open-source software framework that implements rigid body dynamics algorithms and their analytical derivatives. Pinocchio does not only include standard algorithms employed in robotics (e.g., forward and inverse dynamics) but provides additional features essential for the control, the planning and the simulation of robots. In this paper, we describe these features and detail the programming patterns and design which make Pinocchio efficient. We evaluate the performances against RBDL, another framework with broad dissemination inside the robotics community. We also demonstrate how the source code generation embedded in Pinocchio outperforms other approaches of state of the art.