DART  6.6.2
DART - Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkits

Introduction

DART is an open source library for developing kinematic and dynamic applications in robotics and computer animation. DART features two main components: a multibody dynamic simulator developed by Georgia Tech Graphics Lab and a variety of motion planning algorithms developed by Georgia Tech Humanoid Robotics Lab. This document focuses only on the dynamic simulator.

The multibody dynamics simulator in DART is designed to aid development of motion control algorithms. DART uses generalized coordinates to represent articulated rigid body systems and computes Lagrange’s equations derived from D’Alembert’s principle to describe the dynamics of motion. In contrast to many popular physics engines which view the simulator as a black box, DART provides full access to internal kinematic and dynamic quantities, such as mass matrix, Coriolis and centrifugal force, transformation matrices and their derivatives, etc. DART also provides efficient computation of Jacobian matrices for arbitrary body points and coordinate frames.

The contact and collision are handled using an implicit time-stepping, velocity-based LCP (linear-complementarity problem) to guarantee non-penetration, directional friction, and approximated Coulombs friction cone conditions. The LCP problem is solved efficiently by Lemke's algorithm. For the collision detection, DART directly uses FCL package developed by UNC Gamma Lab.

In addition, DART supports various joint types (ball-and-socket, universal, hinge, and prismatic joints) and arbitrary meshes. DART also provides two explicit integration methods: first-order Runge-Kutta and fourth-order Runge Kutta.