Documentation of lpzrobots

16-January-2007

Organization:

University Leipzig
Institute for Computer Science
Dept. Intelligent Systems
Prof. Dr. Ralf Der
Research Group Neuroinformatics und Robotic

People:

Ralf Der, Georg Martius, Frank Hesse, Rene Liebscher, Marcel Kretschmann, Dominic Schneider, Claus Stadler, Frank Güttler

General

This is a collection of algorithms, simulations, and tools developed by the robot group of the University Leipzig
(http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de). It consists of the following directories (click for details):

• selforg : controllers together with a small framework for using them, developed in the robotic group of Leipzig university yielding at self-organized behaviour for various kinds of machines.
• ode_robots : stuff needed for our ODE-simulations (Open Dynamics Engine, see http://www.ode.org) such as robots, obstacles, utils, our patches and stuff for visualization with OSG (OpenSceneGraph, see http://www.openscenegraph.org)
• guilogger : application that coordinates multiple gnuplot windows and switches channels on or of, data is sent per pipe from your program
• neuronviz : application that displays neural networks
• webots : directory with some webots simulations
• opende : directory with a snapshot of the open dynamics engine (some developer version after 0.6) (please follow the link for installion hints)

Requirements

You need the following software and libraries installed (Tested on Linux x86 machines)

• ODE see http://www.ode.org which is now in the opende directory (please follow the instrutions printed by the Makefile in lpzrobots)
• OpenSceneGraph http://www.openscenegraph.org (version >= 0.9.8) (Debian includes it in Etch (Testing) and higher)
• (optional) Qt library from http://www.trolltech.com for guilogger (version > 3.0)
  • make sure you install the devel packages
  • set the following enviroment variables (best to have them in the ~/.bash.rc or similar)

    	export QTDIR="/usr/lib/qt3"
    	export PATH="$PATH:$QTDIR/bin" # also $HOME/bin is required to start the executables
    	

• (optional) Java JDK for neuronviz (version >= J2SE 1.5.0)

Installation \& Startup

• Download source tar ball from http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/software .
• Unpack file.
• Change into lpzrobots directory
• Call make . It will to the following:
  • it compiles neuronviz (not strictly necessary, only for displaying neuronal network online)
  • it compiles guilogger (not strictly necessary, only for displaying parameters online)
  • Please note, that the make call will not fail if either of them failed to make, because they are optional. Type make guilogger and make neuronviz to compile them seperately.
  • it creates dependency files and creates links to header files, that they can be found.
  • it prints some information how to install the ODE residing in the opende directory.
• Call make install to install the guilogger binary and the neuronviz stuff to your ~/bin and ~/lib folder of your home directory. (Might be necessary to create the folders by hand.)
• To start a simulation go into that simulation directory, call make and ./start. For example when you want to start the template_onerobot simulation type cd ode_robots/simulations/template_onerobot, then call make and after successful compilation type start to start the simulation (make opt will produce and start_opt, which is compiled with optimisation. (might need a make clean before))
• The following command line options are available (type start -h for a full list of options):
  

  Usage: ./start [-g [interval]] [-f [interval]] [-r seed] [-x WxH] [-pause] [-noshadow] [-drawboundings] [-simtime [min]]
          -g [interval]   use guilogger (default interval 1)
          -f [interval]   write logging file (default interval 5)
          -n [interval]   use neuronviz (default interval 10)
          -r seed         random number seed
          -x WxH          window size of width(W) x height(H) is used (640x480 default)
          -pause          start in pause mode
          -noshadow       disables shadows and shaders
          -drawboundings  enables the drawing of the bounding shapes of the meshes
          -simtime [min]  intended simulation time in minutes
  

• Have a look at the console after starting the program, there you will find some further information for the usage of the program.
• For starting your own simulation see paragraph "How to Start Your Own Simulation" in ode_robots.
• For a well documented examples of a main.cpp of a simulation and a robot .cpp file click the tab "Examples" at the top of this page.

Documentation

• This manual can be found at http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/software
• More informations on the used self-organization algorithm is available at http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/research
• The ODE tutorial of Marcel Kretschmann can be found at http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/students
  (Tar ball with pdf and example code also there available.)
• The original ODE documentation can be found at http://www.ode.org/ode-docs.html
• The OSG documentation can be found at http://www.openscenegraph.org/osgwiki/pmwiki.php/Documentation/Documentation

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