Robotics Toolbox for Python v1.0
The Robotics Toolbox for Python v1.0 has been released, and you can find the project on GitHub or install it simply by
pip install roboticstoolbox-python
This is a joint effort with Jesse Haviland and provides equivalent (or better) functionality compared to the venerable Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB. It's a redesign more than a port, but much will be familiar to users of the old Toolbox. Our design philosophy is outlined in our paper "Not your grandmother’s toolbox – the Robotics Toolbox reinvented for Python".
Early versions have been out for a year now and interest has grown over that time. Thanks to early adopters and senders of issues and pull requests.
We've bumped the version number to 1.0 to signal that this version has all the functionality required for a Python (3rd) edition of the Robotics, Vision & Control book which should be out by the end of the year. Since books have a long life time, our intention is that the current API will be supported into the future. In the short term, effort will go into docstrings and test coverage.
The toolbox supports robot manipulator arms (branched and non branched) and mobile robots. C extensions means that we can compute forward kinematics and Jacobians very quickly (1M Jacobians/second), and we also provide a rich collection of IK solvers. Graphics and animations are done by default using Matplotlib but you can also use Jesse's Swift browser-based 3D simulator which is fast and easy to use. The toolbox has zero dependency on any other robotics package (ROS, MoveIt, OpenRave etc.) but can work with those packages. An xacro preprocessor for URDF files is built in which allows access to the universe of URDF models. We use PyBullet to provide collision checking if required. The toolbox makes strong use of the Spatial Maths Toolbox for Python which provides functions and classes for SO(n), SE(n) matrices, twists, quaternions, roll-pitch-yaw angles etc.
Bookwise, there has been a lot going as well. The 2nd edition (my old MATLAB toolboxes) has been released as two smaller volumes - a robotics book and a vision book. There's also a MATLAB 3rd edition in the pipeline, based on MathWorks, rather than my old MATLAB, Toolboxes. The evolution of the book is shown graphically as
Amazing! Thanks for sharing this toolbox
Michael Woods The original MATLAB version was great! I wonder what we'd be able to simulate in Python
Wow waiting so long, since I took Industrial robotics class in my undergraduate career, amazing! Thanks Peter
I love the logo!
Great stuff!