Geometric Relations Between Rigid Bodies (Part 2): From Semantics to Software

Abstract

Rigid bodies are essential primitives in the modelling of robotic devices, tasks, and perception. Basic geometric relations between rigid bodies include relative position, orientation, pose, linear velocity, angular velocity, twist, force, torque, and wrench. In Part 1, we explicitly stated the semantics of all coordinate-invariant properties and operations, and, more importantly, all the choices that are made in coordinate representations of these geometric relations. This resulted in a set of concrete suggestions for standardizing terminology and notation. In this tutorial, we show how the proposed semantics allow us to write fully unambiguous software interfaces, including automatic checks for semantic correctness of all geometric operations on rigid-body coordinate representations.

A Survey on Domain-Specific Languages in Robotics

“…A good way to promote re-use of s DSL is to provide tutorials and examples of its usage, as download together with software frameworks and dependencies (if necessary), as done for example by [21,8]. Laet et al propose their semantics for standardization in the context of the robotics engineering task force [22].…”

“…portability of the semantics to different platforms [14,19,11]. Laet et al [21] for example model some typical use-cases and show how common errors can be avoided by using its proposed semantics.…”

Manifold Geometry with Fast Automatic Derivatives and Coordinate Frame Semantics Checking in C++

“…The coordinate frame template arguments are arbitrary type names, which can be declared as structs with no definition. This approach has no runtime overhead, in contrast to [10], which stores semantic information inside objects and performs checks at runtime.…”

Constraint-based task programming with CAD semantics: From intuitive specification to real-time control

“…An approach for representing coordinate frames and geometric relations between them, along with an approach for using it in robotic applications was presented in [11], [12].…”

“…Hence, robot tasks can be defined at a semantic level using intuitive geometric constraints between geometrical entities and translated into low-level constraints on the robot's pose. Secondly, we go one step further than frame-based definitions of robot tasks [11], [12] and define constraints between the geometrical entities (e.g., points, curves, surfaces) that compose the manipulation objects and the robotic system. Finally, we propose to have a combination of the approaches from [2], [15], [1] and [3], [13], where several constraints can be minimized together and priorities between tasks can be specified and handled using the null-spaces of constraints.…”