Pinocchio instantiates the state-of-the-art Rigid Body Algorithms for poly-articulated systems based on revisited Roy Featherstone’s algorithms. Besides, Pinocchio provides the analytical derivatives of the main Rigid-Body Algorithms, such as the Recursive Newton-Euler Algorithm or the Articulated-Body Algorithm.

Pinocchio was first tailored for robotics applications, but it can be used in other contexts (biomechanics, computer graphics, vision, etc.). It is built upon Eigen for linear algebra and FCL for collision detection. Pinocchio comes with a Python interface for fast code prototyping, directly accessible through Conda.

Pinocchio is now at the heart of various robotics software as Crocoddyl, an open-source and efficient Differential Dynamic Programming solver for robotics, the Stack-of-Tasks, an open-source and versatile hierarchical controller framework or the Humanoid Path Planner, open-source software for Motion and Manipulation Planning.

If you want to learn more about Pinocchio internal behaviors and main features, we invite you to read the related paper and the online documentation.

If you want to dive into Pinocchio directly, only one single line is sufficient (assuming you have Conda):

conda install pinocchio -c conda-forge

or via pip (currently only available on Linux):

pip install pin

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• Pinocchio main features
• Documentation
• Examples
• Tutorials
• Pinocchio continuous integrations
• Performances
• Ongoing developments
• Installation
  • ROS
• Visualization
• Citing Pinocchio
• Questions and Issues
• Core-dev team
• Credits
• Open-source projects relying on Pinocchio
• Acknowledgments

Pinocchio main features

Pinocchio is fast:

• C++ template library,
• cache friendly,
• support custom scalar type.

Pinocchio is versatile, implementing basic and more advanced rigid body dynamics algorithms:

• forward kinematics and its analytical derivatives,
• forward/inverse dynamics and their analytical derivatives,
• centroidal dynamics and its analytical derivatives,
• computations of kinematic and dynamic regressors for system identification and more,
• full support of closed-loop mechanisms,
• state-of-the-art frictional contact solvers,
• low-complexity constrained articulated body algorithms,
• sparse constrained dynamics and its analytical derivatives,
• full support of multiple-precision floating-point (MPFR) in Python and C++,
• support of modern and open-source Automatic Differentiation frameworks like CppAD or CasADi,
• automatic code generation support is available via CppADCodeGen.

Pinocchio can support description formats:

• URDF format,
• SDF format,
• MJCF format,
• SRDF format,
• programmatically.

Pinocchio is flexible:

• header only,
• template instantiation,
• C++ 11/14/17/20/23 compliant.

Pinocchio is extensible.

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

Change that doesn’t affect end user should not be listed:

• CI change
• Github specific file change

The format is based on Keep a Changelog.

[Unreleased]

• Homogenize python viewers examples (#2771)
• Add docker images (#2776)
• ROS: added jrl_cmakemodules dependency (#2789)
• Removed CMake < 3.22 details (#2790)
• Python : add overload of BaseVisualizer::play() to VisualizerPythonVisitor (#2796)

Added

• Add names to joints that are inside a composite joint (#2786)

[3.8.0] - 2025-09-17

Added

• Continuous joints can now be parsed as mimic from a urdf file (#2756)
• Beta version of Viser visualizer (#2718)
• Add pinocchio::graph::ModelGraph class
  • Simple API to build a model
  • Manage joint offset
  • Create a pinocchio::Model with any frame as root frame
  • Create a pinocchio::Model with any joint as root joint
  • Reliably merge two models with pinocchio::graph::mergeGraphs function
  • Reliably fix joints at any configuration with pinocchio::graph::fixJointsGraph
  • C++ example
  • Python example
  • Create a pinocchio::geometryModel using a pinocchio::graph::ModelGraph
  • Python example
• Add pinocchio::graph::ModelConfigurationConverter class
  • Convert configuration or tangent vector from two model with different root
  • C++ example
  • Python example
• CMake: Added support for BUILD_STANDALONE_PYTHON_INTERFACE (#2714)

Fixed

• Set axis of unaligned mimic joint (#2763)
• Fixed explicit conversions to Scalar type in log.hxx (#2730)
• Check row dimensions of input Jacobians when computing kinematics Jacobian (#2684)
• Fix case joint_id == 0 in getJointKinematicHessian (#2705)
• Fix nvSubtree computation in case a mimic joint is the last joint in the branch (#2707)
• Fix JointModelMimic::hasConfigurationLimit() to return empty vector instead of delegating to mimicking joint (#2715)
• Fix check mimic_subtree_joint (#2716)
• Fix mimic patch for crba (#2716)
• Fix missing argument in exposeDelassus() pybind definition (#2731)
• Fix copy of Model.armature in buidlReducedModel(…) (#2749)
• Add site attached to a fixed body in MJCF parse (#2754)
• Fix Viser visualizer loading DAE files as trimesh.Scene (#2748)
• Normalize CasADi link target across versions (#2743)

Changed

• Disable coal/hpp-fcl warnings when building Pinocchio (#2686)
• CMake: allow use of system example-robot-data (#2728)

[3.7.0] - 2025-05-21

Changed

• Change the default branch to devel (#2666)
• Implement captureImage for Panda3D visualizer for video recording (#2668)
• Drop Ubuntu 20.04 support (#2680)

[3.6.0] - 2025-04-28

Fixed

• Fix getters for models and data in VisualizerPythonVisitor (#2647)
• Fix pinocchio::cholesky::Mv build with CppAd scalar (#2659)
• Fix pinocchio::contactABA build with casadi scalar (#2659)

Added

• Add explicit template instantiation for constraint algorithms for casadi, CppAD and CppADCodeGen scalar (#2659)
• Add casadi bindings for pinocchio.initConstraintDynamics and pinocchio.constraintDynamics (#2659)

[3.5.0] - 2025-04-02

Added

• Added C++ visualization API, pinocchio::pinocchio_visualizers target (#2574)
• Added forward declaration for class SE3Tpl, and typedef pinocchio::context::SE3 (#2574)
• Add macros PINOCCHIO_COMMON_TYPEDEF and PINOCCHIO_OPTIONS_DEFAULT (#2574)
• Add mimic joint support to the following algorithms: (#2441)
  • Forward kinematics
  • Jacobians and frames
  • Centroid algorithms (ccrba)
  • RNEA
  • CRBA
  • Reachable workspace
• Add mimic argument in pinocchio::urdf::buildModel to parse URDF mimic field (default to false) (#2441)
• Add pinocchio::transformJointIntoMimic to turn a joint into a mimic joint and buildMimicModel to transform multiple joints into mimic joints (#2441)
• Add JointModelBase methods: (#2441)
  • nvExtended to get the DoF of the extended model
  • idx_vExtended to get the joint index in the extended vector of velocity
  • jointExtendedModel{Cols,Rows,Block} to get joint columns/rows/block in extended model matrix

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file