METAPOD — Template META-programming applied to dynamics: CoP-CoM trajectories filtering

Abstract

In this contribution, Metapod, a novel C++ library computing efficiently dynamic algorithms is presented. It uses template-programming techniques together with code-generation. The achieved performances shows some advantage over the state-of-the art dynamic library RBDL mostly on ATOM processor and for the inertia matrix computation, which are relevant for robotics application. On recent desktop computer, the ratio of the gain is not so obvious and in general the time achieved by both library is not significantly different for inverse dynamics. The advantage of this library is that it is open-source and does not rely on any external symbolic computational software. A main drawback is the increase complexity in debugging the code source due to template programming. Additionnaly we show how it can help in current control problems for humanoid robots, and more specifically for dynamic filtering of walking gait trajectories.