For hydro onward, see orocos_kdl.

What can I use KDL for?

• 3D frame and vector transformations: KDL includes excellent support to work with vectors, points, frame transformations, etc. You can calculate a vector product, transform a point into a different reference frame, or even change the reference point of a 6d twist. For more information take a look at the geometry documentation on the KDL homepage.

• Kinematics and Dynamics of kinematic chains: You can represent a kinematic chain by a KDL Chain object, and use KDL solvers to compute anything from forward position kinematics, to inverse dynamics. For more information take a look at the chain documentation on the KDL homepage.The kdl_parser includes support to construct a KDL chain from a XML Robot Description Format (URDF) file.

• Kinematics of kinematic trees: You can represent a kinematic chain by a KDL Chain object, and use KDL solvers to compute forward position kinematics. Currently no other solvers are provided.

KDL examples

See the examples page

Building KDL

First install the external dependencies such as sip4, python, etc.

  $ rosdep install kdl

Now build KDL

  $ rosmake kdl

The "rosmake" command checks out code from the KDL svn repository (see kul-ros-pkg).

External Documentation

KDL is a 3rd party library that is part of the Orocos project KDL homepage.