frax: Fast Robot Kinematics and Dynamics in JAX
Abstract
In robot control, planning, and learning, there is a need for rigid-body dynamics libraries that are highly performant, easy to use, and compatible with CPUs and accelerators. While existing libraries often excel at either low-latency CPU execution or high-throughput GPU workloads, few provide a unified framework that targets multiple architectures without compromising performance or ease-of-use. To address this, we introduce frax, a JAX-based library for robot kinematics and dynamics, providing a high-performance, pure-Python interface across CPU, GPU, and TPU. Via a fully-vectorized approach to robot dynamics, frax enables efficient real-time control and parallelization, while supporting automatic differentiation for optimization-based methods. On CPU, frax achieves low-microsecond computation times suitable for kilohertz control rates, outperforming common libraries in Python and approaching optimized C++ implementations. On GPU, the same code scales to thousands of instances, reaching upwards of 100 million dynamics evaluations per second. We validate performance on a Franka Panda manipulator and a Unitree G1 humanoid, and release frax as an open-source library.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.04310,
title = {frax: Fast Robot Kinematics and Dynamics in JAX},
author = {Daniel Morton and Marco Pavone},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.04310},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
ICRA 2026 Workshop on Frontiers of Optimization for Robotics