What is RKCL?

RKCL stands for Robot Kinematic Control Library. This is a free and open-source software dedicated to the online control of robots. RKCL is organized as a framework of packages containing software libraries and tools written in C++. Originally designed for the control of dual-arm industrial robots, RKCL has been made generic to be compatible with any robot characterized by a kinematic tree structure.

Why RKCL?

RKCL has been developed to address the lack of generic and easy-to-use software solutions for the reactive control of articulated robots. The philosophy behind RKCL is to provide an extensible library that can easily integrate additional features and additional robots over time. Every component which is either developed from scratch or wrapped in RKCL is open source so that everyone can use it and contribute to improve the library.

A major asset of RKCL is that it makes it possible to deal with multiple robots in a same control process. The control strategy takes into account synchronization issues to minimize the error arising from using different hardware components. More details on the method are given in this section