Welcome to DART documentation!

You are reading the DART 7 development documentation

This site documents main’s DART 7 development line; release-6.20 provides DART 6 maintenance documentation. Find published versions and release notes in GitHub Releases.

Introduction

DART (Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit) is a collaborative, cross-platform, open-source library developed by the Graphics Lab and Humanoid Robotics Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with ongoing contributions from the Personal Robotics Lab at the University of Washington and the Open Source Robotics Foundation. It provides data structures and algorithms for kinematic and dynamic applications in robotics and computer animation. DART stands out due to its accuracy and stability, which are achieved through the use of generalized coordinates to represent articulated rigid body systems and the application of Featherstone’s Articulated Body Algorithm to compute motion dynamics.

Getting started

C++: Follow the installation guide and source build guide.
Python: Install dartpy using the installation guide, run the examples, and work through the tutorials.

Updates

2026-10-11: DART version 6.20.0 released. See the CHANGELOG.
Track planned releases in GitHub Milestones.
2022-12-31: DART version 6.13.0 released.

Project Stats

Track GitHub interest over time with Star History. DART 6 benchmark history over commits is covered by the performance dashboard. After the first dashboard publication, the hosted benchmark dashboard is available at dartsim.github.io/dart/performance/dart6/.

Citation

If you use DART in an academic publication, please consider citing this JOSS Paper [BibTeX]

@article{Lee2018,
  doi = {10.21105/joss.00500},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00500},
  year  = {2018},
  month = {Feb},
  publisher = {The Open Journal},
  volume = {3},
  number = {22},
  pages = {500},
  author = {Jeongseok Lee and Michael X. Grey and Sehoon Ha and Tobias Kunz and Sumit Jain and Yuting Ye and Siddhartha S. Srinivasa and Mike Stilman and C. Karen Liu},
  title = {{DART}: Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit},
  journal = {The Journal of Open Source Software}
}