PYROBOCOP: Python-based Robotic Control & Optimization Package for Manipulation

TL;DR

PYROBOCOP is a Python package that enables control, optimization, and estimation of complex robotic systems with nonlinear dynamics and contact constraints, facilitating advanced manipulation tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework for modeling and optimizing robotic systems with contact and obstacle constraints using direct transcription and automatic differentiation.

Findings

Successfully applied to manipulation problems

Handles complementarity constraints efficiently

Integrates with IPOPT and ADOL-C for optimization and derivatives

Abstract

PYROBOCOP is a Python-based package for control, optimization and estimation of robotic systems described by nonlinear Differential Algebraic Equations (DAEs). In particular, the package can handle systems with contacts that are described by complementarity constraints and provides a general framework for specifying obstacle avoidance constraints. The package performs direct transcription of the DAEs into a set of nonlinear equations by performing orthogonal collocation on finite elements. PYROBOCOP provides automatic reformulation of the complementarity constraints that are tractable to NLP solvers to perform optimization of robotic systems. The package is interfaced with ADOL-C[1] for obtaining sparse derivatives by automatic differentiation and IPOPT[2] for performing optimization. We evaluate PYROBOCOP on several manipulation problems for control and estimation.