Tasks

June 3, 2026 · View on GitHub

License Hosted By: Cloudsmith CI Documentation

Tasks is library for real time control of robots and kinematic trees using constrained optimization. It has been used extensively to control humanoid robots such as HOAP-3, HRP-2, HRP-4 and Atlas.

Documentation

Features:

  • Support Kinematics Tree with Revolute/Prismatic/Spherical/Free/Planar/Cylindrical joints
  • Dynamic motion (motion must fulfill the equation of motion)
  • Contact forces in friction cones
  • Static contacts
  • Articular position, speed and torque limits
  • Collision avoidance
  • Multi-robot contact (can solve problems involving multiple robots in contact)
  • Tasks:
  • Posture target (articular position target, mandatory if you want avoid singularity issues)
  • Link Position/Orientation target
  • Link Velocity target
  • Center of Mass (CoM) target
  • Momentum target
  • Contact force target

To make sure that Tasks works as intended, unit tests are available for each algorithm.

The SpaceVecAlg and RBDyn tutorial is also a big resources to understand how to use Tasks by providing a lot of IPython Notebook that will present real use case.

An online documentation can be found online.

Installing

Nix

Run python interpreter

To get a python interpreter, use

nix run github:jrl-umi3218/Tasks

and use it with

import tasks
# ...

Build

To build this software simply use

nix build github:jrl-umi3218/Tasks#tasks

Develop

To work on the project, use a development shell

gh repo clone jrl-umi3218/Tasks
cd Tasks
direnv allow # or nix develop
cmake -B build $cmakeFlags
cmake --build build

Overlay

To use in your own nix flakes, you may use the overlay provided in https://github.com/mc-rtc/nixpkgs or add this repository's flake to your flake inputs.

Ubuntu LTS (22.04, 24.04, 26.04)

You must first setup our package mirror:

curl -1sLf \
  'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/mc-rtc/stable/setup.deb.sh' \
  | sudo -E bash

You can also choose the head mirror which will have the latest version of this package:

curl -1sLf \
  'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/mc-rtc/head/setup.deb.sh' \
  | sudo -E bash

You can then install the package:

sudo apt install libtasks-dev python-tasks python3-tasks

Conan

Install the latest version using conan

conan remote add multi-contact https://api.bintray.com/conan/gergondet/multi-contact
# Install the latest release
conan install Tasks/latest@multi-contact/stable
# Or install the latest development version
# conan install Tasks/latest@multi-contact/dev

Manually build from source

Dependencies

To compile you need the following tools and libraries:

For Python bindings:

Building

git clone --recursive https://github.com/jrl-umi3218/Tasks
cd Tasks
mkdir _build
cd _build
cmake [options] ..
make && make intall

CMake options

By default, the build will use the python and pip command to install the bindings for the default system version (this behaviour can be used to build the bindings in a given virtualenv). The following options allow to control this behaviour:

  • PYTHON_BINDING Build the python binding (ON/OFF, default: ON)
  • PYTHON_BINDING_FORCE_PYTHON2: use python2 and pip2 instead of python and pip
  • PYTHON_BINDING_FORCE_PYTHON3: use python3 and pip3 instead of python and pip
  • PYTHON_BINDING_BUILD_PYTHON2_AND_PYTHON3: builds two sets of bindings one with python2 and pip2, the other with python3 and pip3
  • BUILD_TESTING Enable unit tests building (ON/OFF, default: ON)