GAFRO: Geometric Algebra for Robotics

Geometry is a fundamental part of robotics, and there have been various frameworks of representation over the years. Recently, geometric algebra (GA) has gained attention for its property of unifying many of those previous ideas into one algebra. While there are already efficient open source implementations of GA available, none of them is targeted at robotics applications. We want to address this shortcoming with our library Geometric Algebra for Robotics (GAFRO). This article presents an overview of the implementation details as well as a tutorial on GAFRO, an efficient C++ library targeting robotics applications using GA. The library focuses on using conformal GA (CGA). Hence, various geometric primitives are available for computation as well as rigid body transformations. The modeling of robotic systems is also an important aspect of the library. It implements various algorithms for calculating the kinematics and dynamics of such systems as well as objectives for optimization problems (see Figure 1). The software stack is completed by Python bindings in pygafro and a Robotic Operating System (ROS) interface in gafro_ros.