  Many problems in robotics are fundamentally problems of geometry, which lead
to an increased research effort in geometric methods for robotics in recent
years. The results were algorithms using the various frameworks of screw
theory, Lie algebra and dual quaternions. A unification and generalization of
these popular formalisms can be found in geometric algebra. The aim of this
paper is to showcase the capabilities of geometric algebra when applied to
robot manipulation tasks. In particular the modelling of cost functions for
optimal control can be done uniformly across different geometric primitives
leading to a low symbolic complexity of the resulting expressions and a
geometric intuitiveness. We demonstrate the usefulness, simplicity and
computational efficiency of geometric algebra in several experiments using a
Franka Emika robot. The presented algorithms were implemented in c++20 and
resulted in the publicly available library \textit{gafro}. The benchmark shows
faster computation of the kinematics than state-of-the-art robotics libraries.
