DART: Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit

DART 6.17.0 is a maintenance release on the DART 6 LTS compatibility line. It backports bug fixes and additive improvements to the classic DART 6 API that were made on main during DART 7 development, so that DART 6 and gz-physics users receive them before the DART 7 clean break removes the legacy API from main.

• GUI

  • Fix RealTimeWorldNode stalling when the viewer lags behind real time: #2088

• Collision

  • Preserve the minimum pair distance in FCL distance queries: #2243, #1539
  • Fix plane collision handling for the Bullet and FCL backends: #2246
  • Fix an FCL mesh contact regression: #2258
  • Fix Bullet ellipsoid rolling by using primitive sphere/ellipsoid shapes: #2274
  • Handle non-Skeleton MetaSkeleton subscriptions in CollisionGroup without crashing: #2277
  • Stabilize FCL contact normals and make collision ordering deterministic: #2282
  • Guard the body-node collision filter against missing body nodes: #2343
  • Add Contact accessors for the shape frame, shape node, and body node: #2245
  • Fix memory leaks and a use-after-free in the Bullet collision backend: #2101
  • Fix a Bullet collision-detection correctness issue: #2091
  • Fix ODE HeightmapShape visual/collision mismatch and a dangling-pointer bug: #2305

• Constraint

  • Recover finite Dantzig LCP solutions instead of zeroing the result when only some entries are NaN: #2253

• Dynamics

  • Compute BodyNode potential energy from the center of mass: #2224
  • Add BodyNode world-transform derivative APIs: #2131
  • Preserve Collada unit scaling in MeshShape: #2152
  • Add debug assertions for non-finite joint inputs: #2273
  • Emit collision-shape added/removed signals on shape changes: #2250
  • Deep-copy shapes when cloning skeletons: #2239, #896
  • Add PlanarJoint SE(2) conversion helpers: #2231
  • Fix joint impulse statefulness by moving impulse state into GenericJointState: #2308
  • Add a state-independent Joint::integratePositions overload: #2309
  • Validate negative physics parameters at runtime instead of asserting: #2431
  • Clear stale joint commands when the actuator type changes: #2098
  • Fix the FreeJoint world Jacobian translation: #2298

• Parsers

  • Enforce SDF joint position limits when finite: #2232
  • Handle tiny/degenerate SDF inertial data and warn on missing <inertial>: #2284

• Common

  • Fix Signal thread-safety regressions: #2181
  • Add StlAllocator::max_size and make deallocate noexcept: #2287
  • Fix Aspect lifecycle when an aspect is replaced: #2304
  • Make CloneableMap copy null-safe: #2358

• Build

  • Prefer the prefix-local Vulkan loader for the ImGui example: #2085
  • Allow configuring (or disabling) the examples install destination: #2100
  • Register dart::utils parser sources correctly in CMake: #2314