Giskard(py)

Giskard is an open source motion planning framework for ROS, which uses constraint and optimization based task space control to generate trajectories for the whole body of mobile manipulators.

Installation instructions for Ubuntu 20.04 + Noetic

Install Giskardpy

https://github.com/SemRoCo/giskardpy/tree/giskard_library

ROS Workspace

source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash           # source ROS
mkdir -p ~/giskardpy_ws/src                 # create directory for workspace
cd ~/giskardpy_ws                           # go to workspace directory
catkin init                                 # init workspace, you might have to pip install catkin-tools
cd src                                      # go to source directory of workspace
wstool init                                 # init rosinstall
wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SemRoCo/giskardpy_ros/master/rosinstall/noetic.rosinstall
                                            # update rosinstall file
wstool update                               # pull source repositories
rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths .  # install dependencies available through apt
pip3 install -r giskardpy_ros/requirements.txt  # install python deps
cd ..                                       # go to workspace directory
catkin build                                # build packages
source ~/giskardpy_ws/devel/setup.bash      # source new overlay

Tutorials

https://github.com/SemRoCo/giskardpy/wiki

How to cite

@phdthesis{stelter25giskard,
	author = {Simon Stelter},
	title = {A Robot-Agnostic Kinematic Control Framework: Task Composition via Motion Statecharts and Linear Model Predictive Control},
	year = {2025},
	doi = {10.26092/elib/3743},	
}