v2.4.1

This patch improves formatting of the pybview command line URDF viewer output.

v2.4.0

v2.4.0

This release adds a simple command line tool for easily viewing URDF files with PyBullet, called pybview, which also prints out information about the links and joints of the robot.

This tool is expected to be useful for rapid development and debugging of URDF files.

v2.3.1

v2.3.1

This minor release simplifies the dependency versions required for pyb_utils (notably for numpy and scipy, but now also any Python >= 3.8 is supported).

The main other (non-user facing) change is that uv is now used to manage, build, and publish the project.

v2.3.0

v2.3.0

This release adds support for Python 3.12.

Currently all Python versions between 3.8 and 3.12 (inclusive) are supported.

v2.2.1

This hotfix release fixes a bug where ghost objects' orientation was not being updated properly, thanks to @blooop.

v2.2.0

Additions

• Add a dedicated GhostObject.box constructor (thanks to @ags-dy).
• Add client_id argument to GhostObject.
• Add FrameRecorder class, which is an alternative way to record videos of the simulation as a sequence of frames (images).
• Add principal rotation matrix functions rotx, roty, rotz, as well as rot2d for 2D rotation matrices. This was added because scipy is now used internally for rotations, and it does not provide these functions directly.

Changes

• Internal: use scipy for rotation math instead of spatialmath.

v2.1.0

This release adds contact wrench and more quaternion utility functions.

Contact wrench utilities

• The functions get_point_contact_wrench, get_points_contact_wrench, and get_total_contact_wrench have been added for computing the contact wrench exerted on one object through contact with another.

Quaternion utilities

• The functions quatx, quaty, and quatz have been added to construct quaternions representing rotations about the major axes.
• Under the hood, the quaternion functions have all been rewritten to use spatialmath.UnitQuaternion.

Future

• The field localInerialPos of the DynamicsInfo named tuple is misspelled; this will be fixed in a future major release.

v2.0

A new major release! (which means breaking changes!)

Breaking Changes

Robot

• The robot class now distinguishes between three sets of joints: all joints (including all fixed joints), moveable joints (excludes fixed joints), and actuated joints (the ones that the user actually wants to control). There are corresponding properties num_total_joints, num_moveable_joints, and num_actuated_joints, as well as all_joint_names, moveable_joint_names, and actuated_joint_names. The previous attribute num_joints has been removed, with num_moveable_joints being its replacement.
• The constructor argument tool_joint_name has been removed and is replaced with tool_link_name to be more intuitive: the end effector/tool is a link.

Collision Detector

The collision detector API has been revised to be simpler and less verbose, which also means that every method of the CollisionDetector class now has a slightly different signature.

• Collision pairs are now specified as plain tuples, each a pair of collision objects. A collision object is either a single int representing a body UID, a tuple (body_uid, link_uid), or a tuple (body_uid, link_name). This also means the verbose NamedCollisionObject dataclass is no longer with us.
• The CollisionDetector no longer takes a dictionary mapping body names to indices anymore; this was cumbersome.
• The CollisionDetector no longer knows anything about commanding robots. This should be handled by the user outside of the detector (see the updated example script).

Other Changes

• The Robot class now has the convenience methods get_link_index and get_joint_index for convenient look-up by name.
• The Robot class now has the property link_names, a list of all its link names.
• Added the as_rotation_matrix parameter to BulletBody.get_pose.
• Some additional tests and typo fixes.

v1.3.1

This minor release upgrades the Pillow dependency to 10.0.1 to fix some vulnerabilities and also removes an incorrect transpose in the segmentation mask in the camera example script.

v1.3.0

This release primarily focuses on improving the Robot class:

• Only parse the non-fixed joints of the robot by default.
• Allow manually specifying which joints are actuated.
• Add the set_joint_friction_force method to enable free-moving joints.
• Add the command_effort method for torque joint.
• Add the as_rotation_matrix argument to the get_link_pose methods to automatically convert the quaternion to a rotation matrix before returning it.

Two new examples have also been added: an under-actuated 2-link planar pendulum and a task-space robot arm control demo.

Finally, the function get_urdf_path has also been added to obtain URDFs packaged with pyb_utils (currently only the two-link pendulum mentioned above).