PyROBOCOP: Python-based Robotic Control & Optimization Package for Manipulation

PyROBOCOP is a Python-based package for control, optimization and estimation of robotic systems described by nonlinear Differential Algebraic Equations (DAEs). In particular, the package can handle systems with contacts that are described by complementarity constraints and provides a general framework for specifying obstacle avoidance constraints. The package performs direct transcription of the DAEs into a set of nonlinear equations by performing orthogonal collocation on finite elements. PyROBOCOP provides automatic reformulation of the complementarity constraints that are tractable to NLP solvers to perform optimization of robotic systems. The package is interfaced with ADOL-C [1] for obtaining sparse derivatives by automatic differentiation and IPOPT [2] for performing optimization. We evaluate PyROBOCOP on several manipulation problems for control and estimation.