On 14/06/2009, at 3:13 AM, Mr. George Warner wrote:
> On d) if anyone can point me to a decent open-source kinematics
> library I'm all ears...
I've considered kinematics pretty much "open-source" since Newton
published "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" in 1687. ;-)
I wonder how many times I've (re)invented that wheel?
Well, this is the problem. I'm not super hot on maths, so for me to
reinvent the wheel from first principles would be a long drawn-out
process. For example, I found a very nice paper that fairly clearly
laid out an approach to the problem that made sense to me, but didn't
include much detail, and talked about "Jacobians" as if anyone would
know exactly what they were and how to code them. What little code it
included was in Eiffel - typical academics ignoring what people
actually use in the real world.
Therefore not reinventing the wheel is exactly why a good open source
library is needed...
Humor aside (too late…):
A developer on the gamedev.net site posted this one a while back: <http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/ikanimationtoolkit
>. I downloaded and played with it and while not 100% "complete" did
do most of the job.
QVM is a library that's specialized for 3D kinetic problems (vector,
matrix and quaternion C++ classes for 3D kinematics).
QVM I have come across. There are others too, such as KDL.
The problem I seemed to run into (but maybe it's my misunderstanding)
is that most of them are solving simple-ish chains of joints such as
robot arms, whereas many of the mechanisms I'm interested in involve
feedback connections and "loops". I could be wrong but these libraries
don't tackle this adequately. Also many are focussed on inverse
kinematics, though for me I think I just need forward kinematics but
allowing loops.
--Graham
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