Constrained Articulated Body Dynamics Algorithms

Rigid-body dynamics algorithms have played an essential role in robotics development. By finely exploiting the underlying robot structure, they allow the computation of the robot kinematics, dynamics, and related physical quantities with low complexity, enabling their integration into chipsets with limited resources or their evaluation at very high frequency for demanding applications (e.g., model predictive control, large-scale simulation, reinforcement learning, etc.). While most of these algorithms operate on constraint-free settings, only a few have been proposed so far to adequately account for constrained dynamical systems while depicting low algorithmic complexity. In this article, we introduce a series of new algorithms with reduced (and lowest) complexity for the forward simulation of constrained dynamical systems. Notably, we revisit the so-called articulated body algorithm (ABA) and the Popov–Vereshchagin algorithm (PV) in the light of proximal-point optimization and introduce two new algorithms, called constrained ABA and proxPV. These two new algorithms depict linear complexities while being robust to singular cases (e.g., redundant constraints, singular constraints, etc.). We establish the connection with existing literature formulations, especially the relaxed formulation at the heart of the MuJoCo and Drake simulators. We also propose an efficient and new algorithm to compute the damped Delassus inverse matrix with the lowest known computational complexity. All these algorithms have been implemented inside the open-source framework Pinocchio and depict, on a wide range of robotic systems ranging from robot manipulators to complex humanoid robots, state-of-the-art performances compared to alternative solutions of the literature.