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 the kinetostatic module porting should be evaluated in terms of performance of all the operations on the module before full porting is considered. The BFL project has a similar proposal: BFL Ideas

• Realistic dynamics simulation of human motion

This project creates a (configurable) set of human skeleton models, adding realistic values of joint ranges, inertias, etc., and implements the solvers for forward and inverse dynamics. These algorithms are well described in the robotics literature, and some reference implementations are available. These implementations however do not comply with the realtime requirements that Orocos wants to achieve in (most of) its solvers, so specific attention has to be paid in this respect.

• Construction of set of realistic gaits

This project is complementary to the previous one, in that it creates nominal motion patterns for humanoid kinematic chains: walking (at different speeds), reaching, running, etc. This work involves appropriate combinations of constraints on the humanoid skeletons' joint space and Cartesian space motion degrees of freedom, the selection of appropriate balance and motion control algorithms, and the specification of relevant task primitives.

• Adding mobile platform kinematic chains

This project adds the most common kinematic chains of mobile robots to KDL: car and bicycle like kinematics; differentially driven kinematics; truck-and-trailer kinematics; etc. It also provides support for appropriate elementary motion profiles for such devices, including both instantaneous motion commands and non-instantaneous trajectories.

Requirements: Basic C++ knowledge, robot kinematics.

Willing to learn: KDL, kinematics and dynamics solvers.

Results: realistic simulation of human and mobile platform motion (instantaneous motion as well as non-instantaneous "trajectories").

Mentors: Herman Bruyninckx, Ruben Smits