OpenRave is a set of command line and GUI tools for developing, testing, and deploying motion planning algorithms in real-world applications. One of the OpenRave modules is IKFast, which is a robot kinematics compiler. OpenRave was created by a Robotic researcher called Rosen Diankov.

The IKFast compiler analytically solves the inverse kinematics of a robot and generates optimized and independent C++ files, which can be deployed in our code for solving IK. The IKFast compiler generates analytic solutions of IK, which is much faster than numerical solutions provided by KDL. The IK Fast compiler can handle any number of DOF, but practically it is well suited for DOF <= 6.

The IKFast is a Python script that takes arguments such as IK types, robot model, joint position of base link, and end effector.

The following are the main IK types supported by IKFast:

• Transform6D: This end effector should reach the commanded 6D transformation
• Rotation 3D: This end effector should reach the commanded 3D rotation
• Translation 3D: This end effector origin should reach the desired 3D translation