Darp.Tesseract.Native

Generated .NET bindings for Tesseract Robotics. The package exposes the SWIG-generated API directly and ships ready-to-use native runtimes for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Architecture

The repository keeps the native and managed build boundaries separate:

• Pixi locks the compiler and third-party native dependency environment.
• A root CMake superbuild copies the pinned Tesseract submodule into an ignored build directory, applies the repository's focused runtime-dependency patch, builds Tesseract statically, and builds the generated wrapper against that private installation.
• dotnet pack consumes the resulting artifacts/native/<rid>/ directories without invoking Pixi or CMake.
• NuGet's standard runtimes/<rid>/native/ assets select and deploy the matching wrapper and its adjacent runtime dependencies.

The Tesseract checkout stays pristine. patches/tesseract-runtime-dependencies.patch contains two focused build-graph changes: it makes PCL-backed URDF point-cloud parsing optional and avoids linking the compiled Boost.Graph library when Tesseract only consumes its header API. This removes the PCL/VTK and Boost.Regex/ICU runtime graphs while retaining normal URDF geometry, meshes, octomap files, and scene-graph functionality.

The single tesseract_csharp wrapper contains statically linked Tesseract components and the Bullet, FCL, KDL, OPW, and UR plugin factories. A generated internal bootstrap registers that already-loaded wrapper with Tesseract's normal plugin loader. Existing SRDF/YAML class aliases and search-library entries therefore continue to work without separate generic factory libraries.

The native build targets win-x64, linux-x64, linux-arm64, osx-x64, and osx-arm64 on matching native hosts. Windows ARM64 is deferred. Linux targets glibc 2.28 and expects the distribution's standard C/C++ runtimes and zlib; the package supplies the adjacent robotics dependency closure. macOS targets 11.0.

Current binding surface

The modular SWIG inputs cover feasible non-visual APIs from:

• common values, resources, containers, and plugin metadata;
• Eigen vectors, matrices, quaternions, and transforms;
• geometry and scene graphs;
• URDF/SRDF parsing and state solvers;
• collision-manager lifecycle and stable operations;
• environments, joint groups, FK, Jacobians, KDL/OPW/UR IK, and generic IKFast-facing types.

Unsupported C++ shapes are ignored explicitly in the component interface files. A curated managed façade, visualization, ROS integration, PCL point-cloud parsing, and robot-specific IKFast solvers are outside this package.

Kinematics example

var urdf = File.ReadAllText("robot.urdf");
var srdf = File.ReadAllText("robot.srdf");

using var locator = new GeneralResourceLocator();
locator.addPath(Path.GetFullPath("resources"));

using var sceneGraph = TesseractNative.parseURDFString(urdf, locator);
using var srdfModel = new SRDFModel();
srdfModel.initString(sceneGraph, srdf, locator);

using var environment = new Darp.Tesseract.Native.Environment();
if (!environment.init(sceneGraph, srdfModel))
    throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not initialize the environment.");

using var group = environment.getKinematicGroup("manipulator");
using var seed = new VectorXd(checked((int)group.numJoints()));
seed.AsSpan().Clear();

var tip = group.getActiveLinkNames()[^1];
using var transforms = group.calcFwdKin(seed);
using var target = transforms.get(tip);
using var input = new KinGroupIKInput(target, group.getBaseLinkName(), tip);
using var solutions = group.calcInvKin(input, seed);

Native-backed spans such as VectorXd.AsSpan() and IKSolutions.GetSolutionSpan() remain valid only while their owning proxy is alive and unchanged.

Develop locally

Initialize the pinned Tesseract source:

git submodule update --init native/tesseract

Install Pixi on Windows when it is not already available:

$pixi = ./scripts/install_pixi.ps1

Generate committed binding sources explicitly:

pixi run -e bindings generate-bindings

Build the current host's native runtime:

pixi run build-native

The command produces only artifacts/native/<host-rid>/. Managed packaging and tests remain ordinary .NET operations:

dotnet pack src/Darp.Tesseract.Native/Darp.Tesseract.Native.csproj -c Release -o artifacts/packages
dotnet test --project tests/Darp.Tesseract.Native.IntegrationTests/Darp.Tesseract.Native.IntegrationTests.csproj -c Release

CI builds the five native RIDs independently, merges their artifacts into one NuGet package, and runs the smoke tests from that package without Pixi or native build paths.

Extend the bindings

Add public headers deliberately to the relevant file under bindings/components/. Put only reusable ownership, container, filesystem, Eigen, or exception behavior under bindings/support/. Run pixi run -e bindings generate-bindings and review the generated C# and C++ diffs before committing them.