Abstract:

PYROBOCOP is a Python-based package for con-trol, optimization and estimation of robotic systems described by nonlinear Differential Algebraic Equations (DAEs). In par-ticular, the package can handle systems with contacts that are described by complementarity constraints and provides a gen-eral 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 reformu-lation 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.