New release with bug fixes, features, & higher quality solutions

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().