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 like the Recursive Newton-Euler Algorithm or the Articulated-Body Algorithm.

Pinocchio is first tailored for robotics applications, but it can be used in extra 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.

Pinocchio is now at the heart of various robotics softwares as the Stack-of-Tasks or the Humanoid Path Planner.

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

Pinocchio is fast:

• C++ template library,
• cache friendly,
• automatic code generation support.

Pinocchio implements rigid body dynamics algorithms:

• forward kinematics and its analytical derivatives,
• forward/inverse dynamics and their analytical derivatives,
• centroidal dynamics and its analytical derivatives.

Pinocchio is flexible:

• header only,
• C++11 compliant.

Pinocchio is multi-thread friendly.
Pinocchio is reliable and extensively tested (unit-tests, simulations and real robotics applications).
Pinocchio is supported on Mac Os X and many Linux distributions (See build status here).

If you want to follow the current developments, you can directly refer to the devel branch.

Pinocchio can be easily installed on various Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) and Unix distributions (Mac OS X, BSD, etc.). Please refer to the installation procedure.

Pinocchio is also being deployed on ROS, you may follow its deployment status on Melodic or Kinetic.

We provide some basic examples on how to use Pinocchio in Python in the examples/python directory.

Pinocchio is coming with a large bunch of tutorials aiming at introducing the basic tools for robotics control. The content of the tutorials are described here and the source code of these tutorials is located here.

To cite Pinocchio in your academic research, please use the following bibtex lines:

@misc{pinocchioweb,
   author = {Justin Carpentier and Florian Valenza and Nicolas Mansard and others},
   title = {Pinocchio: fast forward and inverse dynamics for poly-articulated systems},
   howpublished = {https://stack-of-tasks.github.io/pinocchio},
   year = {2015--2019}
}

and the following one for the reference to the paper introducing Pinocchio:

@inproceedings{carpentier2019pinocchio,
   title={The Pinocchio C++ library -- A fast and flexible implementation of rigid body dynamics algorithms and their analytical derivatives},
   author={Carpentier, Justin and Saurel, Guilhem and Buondonno, Gabriele and Mirabel, Joseph and Lamiraux, Florent and Stasse, Olivier and Mansard, Nicolas},
   booktitle={IEEE International Symposium on System Integrations (SII)},
   year={2019}
}

The algorithms for the analytical derivatives of rigid-body dynamics algorithms are detailed here:

@inproceedings{carpentier2018analytical,
  title = {Analytical Derivatives of Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms},
  author = {Carpentier, Justin and Mansard, Nicolas},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems},
  year = {2018}
}

You have a question or an issue? You may either directly open a new issue or use the mailing list pinocchio@laas.fr.

The following people have been involved in the development of Pinocchio:

• Justin Carpentier (INRIA): main developer and manager of the project
• Nicolas Mansard (LAAS-CNRS): project instructor
• Guilhem Saurel (LAAS-CNRS): continuous integration and deployment
• Joseph Mirabel (LAAS-CNRS): Lie groups support
• Antonio El Khoury (Wandercraft): bug fixes
• Gabriele Buondono (LAAS-CNRS): bug fixes
• Florian Valenza (Astek): core developments and FCL support
• Wolfgang Merkt (University of Edinburgh): ROS integration and support

If you have taken part to the development of Pinocchio, feel free to add your name and contribution here.

The development of Pinocchio is supported by the Gepetto team @LAAS-CNRS and the Willow team @INRIA.