This page contains a list of desired features and development directions for KDL future releases. Feel free to contribute your own, or comment --in favor or against-- existing ones.

Rely more on upstream projects for geometry and algebra computations.

KDL has rolled its own representations for data structures like rigid transformations, and algorithms like the SVD. Maybe some of these choices was justified back in the day when KDL was young, but I doubt the argument still holds for most of them.

These are ideas for extending KDL. Ideas can be combined, extended, ...

• Porting KDL to use Eigen2

This project will look to what extend KDL can use Eigen2 in its different modules. Eigen2 is a very promising fast and versatile matrix library, already used by other big open source projects such as KDE. Especially the kinematic module should be ported from boost::ublas to Eigen2 since it already shown that Eigen2 has better performance.

For now KDL shares his mailinglists with all other Orocos projects. Click below to read the rest of this post.For now KDL shares his mailinglists with all other Orocos projects.

The Orocos development team announces the first bug-fix release of the Orocos Real-Time Toolkit 1.0. This release improved the online documentation, fixed bindings to Xenomai and RTAI and contains additions to the Corba interface.

The Orocos Components Library version 0.2.1 and the Orocos Kinematics and Dynamics Library version 0.2.1 have been released as well. These releases include mainly documentation updates. The 'Component Template' package v1.0 has been released as well, which allows Orocos Component builders to quickly construct a new component. The template offers a ready to use build system (using cmake), an example component and an example test program.

A new version of the Kinematics and Dynamics Library is released. There were no major changes, only fixes to use this library with the Real-Time Toolkit 1.0.0.

Kinematic Chain: Skeleton of a serial robot arm with six revolute joints.

The Kinematics and Dynamics Library (KDL) develops an application independent framework for modelling and computation of kinematic chains, such as robots, biomechanical human models, computer-animated figures, machine tools, etc. It provides class libraries for geometrical objects (point, frame, line,... ), kinematic chains of various families (serial, humanoid, parallel, mobile,... ), and their motion specification and interpolation.