Code generation of algebraic quantities for robot controllers

Controllers for articulated robots such as an arm or a humanoid commonly need to continuously calculate complex algebraic quantities, such as the joint space inertia matrix or Jacobians. An effective and fast implementation of the calculation of these quantities is crucial to achieve complex, yet robust controllers and thus enable sophisticated behaviors in robots. Although the nature of these algebraic quantities is very well known in robotics, they do not lend themselves easily to manual implementation, because of ambiguities and the complexity in their development and use. We propose an approach that addresses this issue by relying on automatic code generation, thus relieving the user from hand crafted development. Our approach also addresses efficiency and speed, in order to satisfy the strict requirements of real time robot controllers, yet it is easy to use. We show the effectiveness of our method by means of some preliminary comparisons.