On Tuesday 01 July 2008 20:00:58 sachinc wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am a new user to KDL. We are investigating the use of KDL for a personal
> robotics program being developed at the company I work for. I have some
> specific questions about some of the features in KDL that I was hoping some
> of the developers could answer.

I'll try to answer your questions as good as possible ;)

> (1) Can we do manipulator dynamics in KDL? I have poked around a little in
> the documentation but can't seem to find examples for this.

We do not yet have dynamics. But i think someone (a master student) was
working on parts of this code. I do not have any details about the code itself
or the status of this code. I'll try to figure this out soon.

> (2) How can we contribute code back? Can we submit patches that will be
> integrated into the code base?

You can always apply patches, they normally are quickly added to the code.

> (3) We were looking at computing the forward kinematics for intermediate
> link frames in addition to doing it for the end-effector so we can use this
> for collision checking. How can I access the intermediate frame poses?
>

We already have this on the svn trunk. See
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~rsmits/kdl/classKDL_1_1ChainFkSolverPos__recursive.html>:

virtual int JntToCart (const JntArray &q_in, Frame &p_out, int segmentNr=-1)

allows you to give a segmentNr for intermediate frame poses.

I don't know which version you are using but the latest release is becoming
really old. I have been triggered a lot lately to release a new version, i'm
working on that, for now it is best that you use the sources from trunk.

Ruben

> Thank you,
>
> Regards,
> Sachin Chitta
>
> Willow Garage Inc.
> (http://www.willowgarage.com)

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, sachinc wrote:

> I am a new user to KDL. We are investigating the use of KDL for a personal
> robotics program being developed at the company I work for. I have some
> specific questions about some of the features in KDL that I was hoping some
> of the developers could answer.
>
> (1) Can we do manipulator dynamics in KDL?
Not yet... We have all the equations ready, and there is not so much to add
to the current version, but it has not yet been done :-(

> I have poked around a little in
> the documentation but can't seem to find examples for this.
>
> (2) How can we contribute code back? Can we submit patches that will be
> integrated into the code base?

After discussion :-) Yes, Orocos is an open source project, and as such it
welcomes contributions!

> (3) We were looking at computing the forward kinematics for intermediate link
> frames in addition to doing it for the end-effector so we can use this for
> collision checking. How can I access the intermediate frame poses?
I hope that Ruben (our KDL maintainer) will provide you with the detailed
answer to this question.

> Regards,
> Sachin Chitta
>
> Willow Garage Inc.
> (http://www.willowgarage.com)
Nice to see a posting with this origin! One of our recent PhD students (and
major Orocos developers, albeit not on the KDL sub-project) moves to the
US, and I adviced him to look for a job with Willow Garage... :-)

Best regards,

Herman

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