dynibo 0.5.2

Tree-structured robot kinematics and dynamics with runtime-size workspace APIs
Documentation

dynibo is a robot kinematics and dynamics library for controller development. It supports manipulators, humanoids, and other robots with fixed or floating bases. It loads robot models from URDF and provides Rust, Python, C, and C++ interfaces.

Features

Fast

Dynibo is written in Rust and reuses per-robot storage. After a Robot and output buffers are created, the main kinematics and dynamics routines do not allocate or resize memory inside the calculation loop.

To put its computation speed in context, we benchmark Dynibo against Pinocchio, an open-source library for robot kinematics and dynamics. The benchmarks use Franka, a fixed-base manipulator with 7 joints, and unitree G1, a floating-base humanoid with 29 joints. The table below shows Dynibo's speedup over Pinocchio for each operation.

Source code to reproduce these results is available in benches/.

Reliable

Dynibo combines maintained fixtures with a seed-reproducible generated-URDF corpus, covering serial and branched robots, fixed and floating bases, mixed joint types, external loads, invalid inputs, and repeated workspace use. Results are checked against finite-difference approximations, consistency relations between related algorithms, and outputs from an independent Pinocchio oracle. Separate tests verify allocation-free execution and the installed Rust, Python, C, and C++ packages. See the test architecture for details.

Easy to Use

Dynibo's API is built around Robot: load a URDF, then call kinematics and dynamics algorithms. Robot manages its internal calculation storage, so users do not need to create and maintain separate Model and Data objects. Rust, Python, C, and C++ interfaces share the same Rust core, making it easy to integrate Dynibo into projects in different languages.

Dependencies

The Rust core has two direct runtime dependencies:

Python wheels bundle the native library and require NumPy 1.23 or newer at runtime.

Quick start

Rust

Add the Cargo package:

cargo add dynibo

Load a URDF and compute a target-link pose:

use dynibo::Robot;

fn main() -> dynibo::Result<()> {
    let mut robot = Robot::from_urdf("robot.urdf")?;
    let tool = robot.link_id("tool")?;
    let q = vec![0.0; robot.joint_count()];

    let pose = robot.forward_kinematics(&q, tool)?;
    println!("translation: {}", pose.translation.vector.transpose());
    Ok(())
}

Python

Install the Python package from PyPI:

python -m pip install dynibo

The Python binding owns its reusable native calculation storage:

import numpy as np

from dynibo import Robot

robot = Robot.from_urdf("robot.urdf")
tool = robot.link_id("tool")
q = np.zeros(robot.joint_count)
pose = robot.forward_kinematics(q, tool)
jacobian = np.empty(6 * robot.generalized_count)
robot.jacobian(q, tool, out=jacobian)
print(pose.translation)

C/C++

C and C++ users can download a prebuilt package for Linux, macOS, or Windows from GitHub Releases, or build and install the package from source. Prebuilt packages contain the shared library, C and C++ headers, pkg-config metadata, and a CMake package configuration. Select the archive matching your operating system and CPU architecture and verify it against the release's SHA256SUMS.

Building from source requires Rust with Cargo and CMake 3.16 or newer:

cmake -S . -B build/c -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build/c --parallel
cmake --install build/c --prefix /opt/dynibo

Use an extracted prebuilt package or a source installation from another CMake project:

find_package(dynibo CONFIG REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(my_robot PRIVATE dynibo::dynibo)

Configure the consumer with -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH pointing to the extracted archive directory or the installation prefix. See the installation guide for platform-specific runtime library paths.

Examples

Complete Rust, Python, C++, and C examples are available in the examples/ directory. Each example exercises all of the main kinematics and dynamics methods.

Supported models

Dynibo supports both fixed-base robots and floating-base robots, using runtime-sized tree URDFs with revolute, continuous, prismatic, and fixed joints. It rejects invalid topology and reports structured errors for bad input lengths, model-mismatched handles, and solver failures.

Testing

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --locked -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace --all-targets --locked

Run the complete local Rust, Python, C, and C++ verification suite with the command below. Pinocchio reference tests are included when Pinocchio is available through pkg-config.

bash ci/test-all.sh

License

Dynibo code is licensed under MIT. Bundled robot descriptions retain their third-party licenses, including Franka's Apache-2.0 license and Unitree's BSD-3-Clause license.

Contributing

Dynibo is still at an early stage, and contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, required checks, and pull request guidelines.

Citation

If Dynibo is useful in your work, please cite it as:

@software{xue2026dynibo,
  author  = {Xue, Xiaojie},
  title   = {Dynibo: a Fast, Lightweight, and Reliable Robot Kinematics and Dynamics Library},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/xiaojie-xue/dynibo}
}