DHCalc

DHCalc is a C++ command-line tool for Denavit-Hartenberg forward kinematics.

Input File Format

A TSV (tab-separated values) is the chosen file format, because a DH table is already tabular data and TSV keeps the input easy to read, easy to generate from spreadsheets or scripts, and easy to parse in a lightweight CLI application.

Supported Columns

Column	Required	Alternatives
r	yes	—
d	yes	—
θ	yes, exactly one	θ_rad · θ_deg (by default)
α	yes, exactly one	α_rad · α_deg (by default)
joint_name	no	—

Notes:

• Blank lines are ignored.
• Lines starting with # are treated as comments.
• Column order can vary.
• The parser expects simple tab-separated values without quoting.

Example Input

See in examples/stanford_arm.dh.tsv

At configure time CMake also generates examples/empty.dh.tsv, a header-only table with the canonical column order and zero data rows.

Build

Requirements:

• CMake 3.20 or newer
• A C++20 compiler
• Eigen 3.3+ installed on the system
• GoogleTest installed on the system (for tests)

Build commands:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make && cd ..
# or
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Run

Basic usage:

./build/dhcalc <path-to-dh-table.tsv>

Optional precision control:

./build/dhcalc examples/stanford_arm.dh.tsv --precision 4

Test

ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

Binary	Directory	Purpose
dhcalc_parser_tests	tests/parser/	TSV parsing, header validation, error handling
dhcalc_fk_tests	tests/fk/	Joint transforms, chain multiplication, formatting
dhcalc_stress_tests	tests/stress/	Large generated tables in /tmp/, timing