# PyRoki: A Modular Toolkit for Robot Kinematic Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03728 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03728/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)
- [CaP-X: A Framework for Benchmarking and Improving Coding Agents for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22435/) (2026)
- [NovaFlow: Zero-Shot Manipulation via Actionable Flow from Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08568/) (2025)
- [Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24766/) (2025)
- [DreamControl: Human-Inspired Whole-Body Humanoid Control for Scene Interaction via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14353/) (2025)
- [SimToolReal: An Object-Centric Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Tool Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16863/) (2026)
- [Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19333/) (2026)
- [FlowHOI: Flow-based Semantics-Grounded Generation of Hand-Object Interactions for Dexterous Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13444/) (2026)
- [MotionBricks: Scalable Real-Time Motions with Modular Latent Generative Model and Smart Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24833/) (2026)
- [Choreographing a World of Dynamic Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04194/) (2026)
- [Learning Human-Like Badminton Skills for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08370/) (2026)
- [Robot-Factored World Models via Robot Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22535/) (2026)
- [IKDiffuser: a Diffusion-based Generative Inverse Kinematics Solver for Kinematic Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13087/) (2025)
- [OmniDexVLG: Learning Dexterous Grasp Generation from Vision Language Model-Guided Grasp Semantics, Taxonomy and Functional Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03874/) (2025)
- [Direct Dynamic Retargeting for Humanoid Imitation Learning from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23762/) (2026)
- [Sequential Planning via Anchored Robotic Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30613/) (2026)
- [PDF-HR: Pose Distance Fields for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04851/) (2026)
- [DreamControl-v2: Simpler and Scalable Autonomous Humanoid Skills via Trainable Guided Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00202/) (2026)
- [A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Multi-Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06990/) (2026)
- [SkipVLA: Skipping VLA Steps with Classical Planning for Fast Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20648/) (2026)
- [HandelBot: Real-World Piano Playing via Fast Adaptation of Dexterous Robot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12243/) (2026)
- [RoSHI: A Versatile Robot-oriented Suit for Human Data In-the-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07331/) (2026)
- [Constrained Whole-Body Tracking for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00374/) (2026)
- [EVA-Client: A Unified Data Collection, Inference, and Deployment Framework for Embodied Policies on Real Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02646/) (2026)
- [HuRo: Robotizing Human Videos for Scalable VLA Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10706/) (2026)
- [X-Reset: Scaling Object-Centric Reinforcement Learning via Cross-Embodiment Resets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35715/) (2026)
- [World Motion Models: Flexible Sequence Modeling of SE(3) Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01742/) (2026)
- [Fly-by-Code: Embodied Coding Agents for Aerial Manipulation with Active Visual and Physical Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12549/) (2026)
- [RoboSimStudio: An Interactive Toolkit for Human and Agent Rapid Real2Sim of Robot Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18835/) (2026)
- [DexMimic: A Generalist Dexterous Hand-Object Tracking Policy via Value-Guided Reset Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19089/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robot motion can have many goals. Depending on the task, we might optimize for pose error, speed, collision, or similarity to a human demonstration. Motivated by this, we present PyRoki: a modular, extensible, and cross-platform toolkit for solving kinematic optimization problems. PyRoki couples an interface for specifying kinematic variables and costs with an efficient nonlinear least squares optimizer. Unlike existing tools, it is also cross-platform: optimization runs natively on CPU, GPU, and TPU. In this paper, we present (i) the design and implementation of PyRoki, (ii) motion retargeting and planning case studies that highlight the advantages of PyRoki's modularity, and (iii) optimization benchmarking, where PyRoki can be 1.4-1.7x faster and converges to lower errors than cuRobo, an existing GPU-accelerated inverse kinematics library.