Pinocchio is open-source software actively developed by the Willow team at Inria in the lovely city of Paris. Pinocchio instantiates state-of-the-art Rigid Body Algorithms for poly-articulated systems, building upon and revisiting the foundational algorithms introduced by Roy Featherstone.

Beyond traditional rigid-body dynamics formulations, Pinocchio delivers cutting-edge algorithmic solutions for modern robotics and physics-based simulation challenges. It efficiently handles closed-loop kinematic mechanisms, solves frictional contact problems, and differentiates physics computations — making it a powerful and versatile library for both research and industrial applications.

Pinocchio also provides analytical derivatives of the main Rigid Body Algorithms — such as the Recursive Newton-Euler Algorithm and the Articulated-Body Algorithm — enabling gradient-based optimization, control, and learning in both simulation and real-world settings.

Pinocchio was originally designed for robotics applications, but it can be used in other contexts (biomechanics, computer graphics, vision, etc.). It is built upon Eigen for linear algebra and coal for collision detection. Pinocchio includes a Python interface for fast code prototyping, directly accessible through Conda.

Pinocchio is now at the heart of various robotics software as Aligator, Crocoddyl, an open-source and efficient Differential Dynamic Programming solver for robotics, the Stack-of-Tasks, an open-source and versatile hierarchical controller framework, or the Humanoid Path Planner, open-source software for Motion and Manipulation Planning. Pinocchio is also a primary source of inspiration for the Kamino simulator developed by Disney Research, which populates the Newton physics engine.

If you want to learn more about Pinocchio internal behaviors and main features, we invite you to read the related paper and the online documentation or DeepWiki.

If you want to dive into Pinocchio directly, only one single line is sufficient (assuming you have Conda):

conda install pinocchio -c conda-forge

or via pip (currently only available on Linux):

pip install pin

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• Pinocchio main features
• Documentation
• Examples
• Tutorials
• Pinocchio continuous integrations
• Performances
• Ongoing developments
• Installation
  • Conda
  • Docker
  • ROS
• Visualization
• Citing Pinocchio
• Citing specific algorithmic contributions
• Contribution
• Core-dev team
• Credits
• Open-source projects relying on Pinocchio
• Acknowledgments

Pinocchio main features

Pinocchio is fast:

• C++ template library,
• cache-friendly,
• support custom scalar type.

Pinocchio is versatile, implementing basic and more advanced rigid body dynamics algorithms:

• forward kinematics and its analytical derivatives,
• forward/inverse dynamics and their analytical derivatives,
• centroidal dynamics and its analytical derivatives,
• computations of kinematic and dynamic regressors for system identification and more,
• full support of closed-loop mechanisms,
• state-of-the-art frictional contact solvers,
• low-complexity constrained articulated body algorithms,
• sparse constrained dynamics and its analytical derivatives,
• full support of multiple-precision floating-point (MPFR) in Python and C++,
• support of modern and open-source Automatic Differentiation frameworks like CppAD or CasADi,
• automatic code generation support is available via CppADCodeGen.

Pinocchio can support description formats:

• URDF format,
• SDF format,
• MJCF format,
• SRDF format,

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Contributing Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in contributing to pinocchio. Whether it’s a bug report, a new feature, a fix, or documentation, we value every contribution.

Read this document before opening an issue or a pull request.

All communication on this project must follow the Code of Conduct.

Table of contents

• Contributing Guidelines
  • Reporting bugs and feature requests
  • Asking questions
  • Contributing via pull requests
    • Choosing an issue
    • Set up the development environment
    • Pull request content
    • Running tests
    • Code style
    • Changelog
  • AI-assisted contributions
    • Responsibility
    • Disclosure
    • Communication
    • Translation
    • AI agent
  • Licensing

Reporting bugs and feature requests

Use the GitHub issue tracker to report bugs or suggest features.

Before opening an issue, check existing open and closed issues to avoid duplicates.

Use the appropriate template and give as much detail as possible. If you don’t use the template, maintainers may close your issue without explanation.

Asking questions

Ask questions in the discussions section. It separates development topics from community questions. Questions posted in the issue tracker will be moved to the discussions section.

Contributing via pull requests

Choosing an issue

Every external contributor pull request needs an associated issue. Open an issue first. Core developers will review it.

An issue is ready for a pull request when:

• It has the ready label.
• It is not assigned.
• It does not have the core developers label.

Issues with the core developers label are reserved for core developers.

If an issue meets these criteria, claim it with a short comment.

Set up the development environment

The easiest way to set up a development environment is to use pixi, as described in the build documentation.

See the CI workflows for examples with other package managers.

Pull request content

To create a pull request, follow the GitHub guides on forking a repository and creating a pull request.

In your pull request:

• Use a descriptive title and follow the pull request template.
• If the pull request is not ready for review, keep it as a draft.
• Keep it to a single self-contained change. Don’t mix unrelated fixes.
• Follow the code convention.
• Keep backward compatibility. Don’t break the API.
• Write tests that cover your changes.
• Add an entry to the changelog.
• Make sure code style checks pass (pixi run lint or pre-commit run --all-files).
• Make sure the CI is green. Ask for help if you’re stuck on a CI issue.
• Check all the appropriate items in the pull request template checklist.

Keeping the pull request up-to-date

You must rebase your work on the upstream devel branch.

git pull --rebase origin devel

Don’t omit the --rebase argument or a merge commit will be created. Using merge commit to update your pull request is discouraged as it create a non linear git history.

Running tests

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