Inverse dynamics solver

This is the accompanying code of the paper

V. Petrone, E. Ferrentino, P. Chiacchio, “A ROS2-based software library for inverse dynamics computation”. Under peer-review.

This repository provides a library to solve the inverse dynamics problem for serial manipulators, i.e., it returns torques or dynamic matrices given input joint positions, velocities and accelerations.

The library is implemented in the inverse_dynamics_solver package. The library is inherited by three concrete classes, i.e.,

• A KDL-based solver for simulated robots, based on their robot description defined via Unified Robot Description Format (URDF)
  • You can find it in the kdl_inverse_dynamics_solver package
• A solver for the real UR10 robot
  • You can find it in the ur10_inverse_dynamics_solver package
• A solver for the real Franka Emika Robot (FER, aka Panda)
  • You can find it in the franka_inria_inverse_dynamics_solver package

Dependencies

This code requires the installation of Ubuntu 22.04 and ROS2 Humble Hawksbill.

System dependencies

To install the packages needed by this repo as system-wide dependencies, run the following command from the repository’s root folder:

rosdep install --from-paths . -i

Python dependencies

To install all Python dependencies, run the following commands from the repository’s root folder:

sudo apt install python3-venv -y
python3 -m venv venv --system-site-packages
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

The dependencies are installed in the virtual environment called venv: to deactivate it, simply run deactivate in your terminal.

Reproducible results

Our results are reproducible via the demos provided in the packages above, or by running the CodeOcean capsule: the latter option does not require installing any dependency on your computer. The capsule is reachable at https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.2265930.v1.

© 2025 Automatic Control Group (DIEM, University of Salerno)