Tropic

Tropic stands for "TRajectory Online Planning in InteraCtion". We selected the name "tropic", because it's a library with a number of hot features:

• Implementations of minimum-jerk trajectory profile with arbitrary number of constraints, to be flexibly applied to position, velocity or acceleration levels, or any combination of these
• Flexible way of incorporating new kinds of trajectory profiles
• ConstraintSet class implementing a hierarchically organized collection of constraints spanning several trajectories, similar to the concept of motion primitives
• Implementation of trajectories in several orientation representations without any representational issues such as jumps at representation boundaries
• Receding horizon implementation to step and re-plan trajectories at every time step
• Class to couple trajectory generation to task-level control to easily run with inverse kinematics / inverse dynamics
• XML factory to read and write trajectories from and to file
• Classes to display trajectories in OpenScenegraph and for plotting

Tropic is written entirely in C++ and requires the standard C++11. It has been successfully compiled and ran on several Linux and Windows systems (Ubuntu 14, 16, 18, 20, Visual studio 2015, 2017). It depends on the Rcs library, a BSD 3-clause licensed library that can freely be downloaded from GitHub: https://github.com/HRI-EU/Rcs. It has been hardened in several research projects, such as for instance this one: https://www.honda-ri.de/human-robot-cooperative-object-manipulation-with-contact-changes

Getting Started

Tropic can be compiled with the cmake build system. To compile it, just type:

cd <build-directory>
cmake <source-directory>
make 

To build the doxygen documentation, just type:

make TrajectoryDoc

Examples

The library comes with several examples. The file TestSimpleTrajectory.cpp contains examples for plotting of single trajectories and stepping them over time. The file TestTrajectory.cpp contains examples for high-dimensional trajectories, and how to step and modify them interactively at run-time. The examples can be started with the command-line option "-h", which will display a help message on all available command line options and graphics window key interactions.

License

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license - see the LICENSE.md file for details

To do

• Rename to better wording:
• fromXML() and toXML() should return false instead of exiting fatally
• relPos / relRot in PositionConstraint / EulerConstraint
• How to deal with transform pointers as anchors? Body names?
• Fix activation access in testIK() of TestTrajectory.cpp