RelaxedIK Solver
Welcome to RelaxedIK! This solver implements the methods discussed in our paper RelaxedIK: Real-time Synthesis of Accurate and Feasible Robot Arm Motion (http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss14/p43.html)
Video of presentation at RSS 2018 (RelaxedIK part starts around 12:00) : https://youtu.be/bih5e9MHc88?t=737
Video explaining relaxedIK https://youtu.be/AhsQFJzB8WQ
RelaxedIK is an inverse kinematics (IK) solver designed for robot platforms such that the conversion between Cartesian end-effector pose goals (such as "move the robot's right arm end-effector to position X, while maintaining an end-effector orientation Y") to Joint-Space (i.e., the robot's rotation values for each joint degree-of-freedom at a particular time-point) is done both ACCURATELY and FEASIBLY. By this, we mean that RelaxedIK attempts to find the closest possible solution to the desired end-effector pose goals without exhibiting negative effects such as self-collisions, environment collisions, kinematic-singularities, or joint-space discontinuities.
To start using the solver, please follow the step-by-step instructions in the file start_here.py (in the root directory)
If anything with the solver is not working as expected, or if you have any feedback, feel free to let us know! (email: rakita@cs.wisc.edu, website: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~rakita) We are actively supporting and extending this code, so we are interested to hear about how the solver is being used and any positive or negative experiences in using it.
Citation
If you use our solver, please cite our RSS paper RelaxedIK: Real-time Synthesis of Accurate and Feasible Robot Arm Motion http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss14/p43.html
@INPROCEEDINGS{Rakita-RSS-18,
AUTHOR = {Daniel Rakita AND Bilge Mutlu AND Michael Gleicher},
TITLE = {{RelaxedIK: Real-time Synthesis of Accurate and Feasible Robot Arm Motion}},
BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems},
YEAR = {2018},
ADDRESS = {Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania},
MONTH = {June},
DOI = {10.15607/RSS.2018.XIV.043}
}
If you use our solver for a robot teleoperation interface, also consider citing our prior work that shows the effectiveness of RelaxedIK in this setting:
A Motion Retargeting Method for Effective Mimicry-based Teleoperation of Robot Arms https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3020254
@inproceedings{rakita2017motion,
title={A motion retargeting method for effective mimicry-based teleoperation of robot arms},
author={Rakita, Daniel and Mutlu, Bilge and Gleicher, Michael},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
pages={361--370},
year={2017},
organization={ACM}
}
An Autonomous Dynamic Camera Method for Effective Remote Teleoperation https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3171221.3171279
@inproceedings{rakita2018autonomous,
title={An autonomous dynamic camera method for effective remote teleoperation},
author={Rakita, Daniel and Mutlu, Bilge and Gleicher, Michael},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
pages={325--333},
year={2018},
organization={ACM}
}
Dependencies
kdl urdf parser:
fcl collision library: https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/python-fcl
scikit learn: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/index.html
Tutorial
For full setup and usage details, please refer to start_here.py in the src directory.
Coming Soon
RelaxedIK has been rewritten in Julia to substantially boost performance. If you would like to try out this version of RelaxedIK before it is pushed to the main branch, feel free to try it out as part of a beta testing phase. To use it, please clone the "dev" branch using the following commands:
git clone -b dev https://github.com/uwgraphics/relaxed_ik.git
install the proper dependenices, and follow the new set of instructions in the start_here.py file.
If you have feedback on your experience using the new version of the solver (positive or negative), please email me at rakita@cs.wisc.edu . The code will be moved to the main branch after this testing phase. Thanks!
Change Log
Version 1.1 (8/16/18): added support for prismatic and fixed joints