Pycapacity: a real-time task-space capacity calculation package for robotics and biomechanics

Abstract

This paper presents a Python package called pycapacity, which provides a set of tools for evaluating task-space physical ability metrics for humans and robots, based on polytopes and ellipsoids. The aim of pycapacity is to provide a set of efficient tools for their evaluation in an easy to use framework that can be easily integrated with standard robotics and biomechanics libraries. The package implements several state of the art algorithms for polytope evaluation that bring many of the polytope metrics to the few milliseconds evaluation time, making it possible to use them in online and interactive applications.