Pycapacity: a real-time task-space capacity calculation package for robotics and biomechanics

This paper presents a Python package called pycapacity, which provides a set of tools for evaluating task-space physical ability metrics for humans and robots, based on polytopes and ellipsoids. The aim of pycapacity is to provide a set of efficient tools for their evaluation in an easy to use framework that can be easily integrated with standard robotics and biomechanics libraries. The package implements several state of the art algorithms for polytope evaluation that bring many of the polytope metrics to the few milliseconds evaluation time, making it possible to use them in online and interactive applications. The package can be easily interfaced with standard libraries for robotic manipulator rigid body simulation such as robotictoolbox or pinocchio, as well as human musculoskeletal model biomechanics software opensim and biorbd. The package can also be used with the Robot Operating System (ROS). The package additionally implements a set of manipulation and visualization tools for polytopes and ellipsoids intended for fast prototyping and quick and interactive visualization