DART 6.16.0

DART 6.16.0 keeps the 6.x LTS line current with the servo-limit fixes and tooling/pixi improvements that landed after 6.15.0.

Highlights

• Servo joints now recover gracefully from hitting position limits, preventing the lock-ups reported in Gazebo/gz-sim (#2086).
• All remaining raw assert calls were replaced with DART_ASSERT to keep diagnostics consistent in release builds (#2117).
• Build fixes:
  • pybind11 detection and assert include handling were hardened for pixi builds (#2118).
  • Eigen guard backported so 3.4+ builds keep working on the release branch (#2108).
  • New toggles let you opt into system Tracy, pybind11, and GoogleBenchmark as needed (#1911, #1907, #1904).
  • Absolute install dir handling corrected for CMake exports (#2006).
• Tooling & docs:
  • Coverage, API docs, and the gz-physics CI job now run completely through pixi tasks (#2036, #2032, #2034).
  • macOS CI installs OpenSceneGraph from source to avoid flaky builds (#2037).
  • Documentation was reorganized so the Python and C++ paths are clearly separated (#2040), and gz-physics integration tests are now part of CI (#2000).

Tested Platforms

• Linux
  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS / GCC 11.4 / x86_64
  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS / GCC 13.2 / x86_64
• macOS 14 / Clang 15 / arm64
• Windows / MSVC 19.40 / x86_64

Installation / Build

See the README for package availability and build instructions. To build from source with pixi:

pixi run build
pixi run build-dartpy        # optional: Python bindings
pixi run test                # C++ tests
pixi run test-py             # python/dartpy tests
pixi run -e gazebo test-gz   # gazebo compatibility test suite

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who reported issues, reviewed PRs, and helped chase down the joint-limit and pixi regressions. Enjoy 6.16.0!