update to 0.6.2

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -10,6 +10,53 @@ its affiliates is strictly prohibited.
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 # Changelog
 
+## Version 0.6.2
+### New Features
+- Added support for actuated axis to be negative (i.e., urdf joints with `<axis xyz="0 -1 0"/>` are
+now natively supported).
+- Improved gradient calculation to account for terminal state. Trajectory optimization can reach 
+within 1mm of accuracy (median across 2600 problems at 0.017mm).
+- Improved estimation of previous positions based on start velocity and acceleration. This enables 
+Trajectory optimization to optimize from non-zero start velocity and accelerations.
+- Added graph planner and finetuning step to joint space planning (motion_gen.plan_single_js). This
+improves success and motion quality when planning to reach joint space targets.
+- Added finetuning across many seeds in motion_gen, improving success rate and motion quality.
+- Add urdf support to usd helper to export optimization steps as animated usd files for debugging 
+motion generation. Check `examples/usd_examples.py` for an example.
+- Retuned weights for IK and Trajectory optimization. This (+ other fixes) significantly improves 
+pose reaching accuracy, IK accuracy improves by 100x (98th percentile < 10 micrometers) and motion 
+generation median at 0.017mm (with). IK now solves most problems with 24 seeds (vs 30 seeds prev.).
+Run `benchmark/ik_benchmark.py` to get the latest results.
+- Added `external_asset_path` to robot configuration to help in loading urdf and meshes from an 
+external directory.
+
+
+### BugFixes & Misc.
+- Update nvblox wrappers to work with v0.0.5 without segfaults. Significantly improves stability.
+- Remove mimic joints in franka panda to maintain compatibility with Isaac Sim 2023.1.0 and 2022.2.1
+- Cleanup docker scripts. Use `build_docker.sh` instead of `build_dev_docker.sh`. Added isaac sim 
+development docker.
+- Fixed bug in backward kinematics kernel, helped improve IK and TO pose reaching accuracy.. 
+- Changed `panda_finger_joint2` from `<axis xyz="0 1 0"/>`
+ to `<axis xyz="0 -1 0"/>` in `franka_panda.urdf` to match real robot urdf as cuRobo now supports
+ negative axis.
+- Changed benchmarking scripts to use lock joint state of [0.025,0.025] for mpinets dataset. 
+- Added scaling of mesh to Mesh.get_trimesh_mesh() to help in debugging mesh world.
+- Improved stability and accuracy of MPPI for MPC.
+- Added NaN checking in STOMP covariance computation to account for cases when cholesky decomp 
+fails.
+- Added ground truth collision check validation in `benchmarks/curobo_nvblox_benchmark.py`.
+
+### Performance Regressions
+- cuRobo now generates significantly shorter paths then previous version. E.g., cuRobo obtains
+2.2 seconds 98th percentile motion time on the 2600 problems (`benchmark/curobo_benchmark.py`), where
+previously it was at 3 seconds (1.36x quicker motions). This was obtained by retuning the weights and
+slight reformulations of trajectory optimization. These changes have led to a slight degrade in 
+planning time, 20ms slower on 4090 and 40ms on ORIN MAXN. We will address this slow down in a later
+release. One way to avoid this regression is to set `finetune_dt_scale=1.05` in 
+`MotionGenConfig.load_from_robot_config()`.
+
+
 ## Version 0.6.1
 
 - Added changes to `examples/isaac_sim` to support Isaac Sim 2023.1.0