The first major-version KDL-Release is being prepared. KDL-1.0 will contain algorithms for rigid-body positions/velocity/force calculations and transformations. This part of KDL is not changed with respect to the previous versions.

There is a major rewrite and API change in the kinematic family section:
* The representation of a chain is changed.
* The usage of all the kinematic solvers is changed.

For now there are solvers for forward and inverse position and velocity kinematics of regular serial chains.
Kinematic algorithms for special cases (serial321, zxxzxz) and different kinds of inverse velocity kinematic solvers (damped least squares, selectively damped least squares, dynamically consistent pseudo inverse solutions etc.) will be added.

There is a toolkit for usage with Orocos-RTT, KDL-objects becomes usable in your RTT-scripts and programs.

There are also bindings for python, so you can use all the rigid-body algorithms and all the kinematic solvers in python.

You can find the API-documentation on [http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~rsmits/kdl].

The sources are available on: [http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~rsmits/kdl/Orocos-KDL-1.0.0-beta1-Source.tar.bz2]

If you find any bugs or have any comments, please contact us on the orocos-dev mailinglist or submit your bugs on the bugzilla-page.

Ruben