Robot Simulator of the Robotics Group for Self-Organization of Control  0.8.0
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Documentation of lpzrobots
Organization:
Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
Inselstr. 22, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
Dr. Georg Martius & Prof. Dr. Ralf Der

University Leipzig
Institute for Computer Science
Dept. Intelligent Systems
Frank Güttler
Research Group: Technische Informatik
People:
Georg Martius, Ralf Der, Frank Hesse, Frank Güttler, Jörn Hoffmann
Former Contributors: Antonia Siegert, Marcel Kretschmann, Dominic Schneider, Claus Stadler

General

This is a collection of algorithms, simulations, and tools developed by the Robotics Group for Self-Organization of Control (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 behavior for various kinds of machines.
  • ode_robots : physics simulator based on ODE (Open Dynamics Engine, see http://www.ode.org). This includes such as robots, obstacles, utilities, stuff for visualization with OSG (OpenSceneGraph, see http://www.openscenegraph.org) and so on.
  • guilogger : application that coordinates multiple gnuplot windows and allows for an interactive display of data that is sent per pipe from another - matrixvix : application for interactive display of changing matrix and vector data
  • configurator : a library implementing a GUI to change the parameters interactively which is otherwise done on the console
  • ga_tools : genetic algorithms framework that can be used to together with ode_robots or for independent simulations (not well maintained) program
  • opende : directory with a snapshot of the open dynamics engine (release 0.11.1) renamed to ode-dbl in order to avoid conflicts with packaged single precision versions. It contains the capsule-box collision bugfix which is upstream (in svn) (please follow the link for installation hints)

Installation & Startup

You have two different ways to get the simulator to work.

Way A: Package installation

Ubuntu

A package repository is hosted at https://launchpad.net/~georg-martius/+archive/lpzrobots
Do on a terminal (or read the link: "read about installing" on that page): 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:georg-martius/lpzrobots
sudo apt-get update

Then you can install lpzrobots as any other package do: 

sudo apt-get install guilogger lpzrobots-oderobots

This will automatically install all other dependencies.

That's it!

Now you can copy the sample simulations from /usr/share/lpzrobots/ to your home directory and continue reading in section Run example Simulations.

debian based systems (deb)

There is an install makefile located here: http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/software/packages/deb/install_deb_source.makefile . Save it on you disk in an empty directory and run on the console 

su -c apt-get install make
make -f install_deb_source.makefile

That will download the newest packages, compile them and install it. If something fails you can also redo parts of the process, see "make -f install_deb_source.makefile help".

The packages are: guilogger, matrixviz, ode-dbl, lpzrobots-selforg, and lpzrobots-oderobots You can uninstall them later using the package manager (apt-get or synaptics)

You can do it step by step as follows: Download all files from http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/software/packages/deb/current/
Then do 

# here you should not be root
 dpkg-source -x guilogger-0.*.dsc
 cd guilogger-0.* 
 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b -uc
 cd ../
# become root (e.g. with su or sudo -s)
 dpkg -i guilogger-0.*.deb

This you have to repeat for each package (e.g. replace guilogger by ode-dbl, lpzrobots-selforg, and lpzrobots-oderobots)

Way B: Installation from source

Linux

Check the Dependencies file for required packages.

MAC

We recommend to install the ODE and OSG via macports (http://www.macports.org) (after installation of macports type on a console sudo port install osg OpenSceneGraph) and see the Dependencies file. We will update the mac-related install procedures soon.

Instructions

  • Download the source tar ball from http://robot.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/software/current .
  • Unpack file (tar -xvzf lpzrobots*.tar).
  • Change into lpzrobots directory
  • Call make help to get a help display and continue with make all. This will do everything. The first time you call it it will configure your build (you can reconfigure later with make conf). The following modules are compiled:
    • matrixviz (not strictly necessary, only for displaying neuronal network parameters online)
    • guilogger (not strictly necessary, only for displaying parameters online (recommended))
    • configurator library (not strictly necessary, only for changing parameters conveniently)
    • Please note, that the make call will not fail if either of them failed to compile, because they are optional. You can type make guilogger and make matrixviz to compile them separately.
    • selforg
    • opende (our ode version with double precision) (required)
    • ode_robots
    • ga_tools

if you do it step by step as display with make help you need to use sudo make xxxx if the installation is into a system directory. (make all will do use it automatically if required). Note that the PATH variable needs to contain the PREFIX/bin (as checked by the configuration process). If you have multiple lpzrobots installations make sure the prefix for the current lpzrobots comes first in the PATH variable

  • Now you are done with the installation and you can try a sample simulation see next section.

Run example Simulations

  • Simulations are located in ode_robots/simulations/,ode_robots/examples/, and selforg/simulations/. This folders you can find in the lpzrobots tar files or if installed on your system under /usr/share/lpzrobotsor/usr/local/share/lpzrobots. In the latter case copy the simulations to your home directory first.
  • To start a simulation go into a simulation directory.
  • Call make to compile it.
  • You can start the simulation by ./start.
  • For example when you want to start the template_sphererobot simulation type: 
    cd ode_robots/simulations/template_sphererobot
./start
  • for optimization you can also use make opt which produces and start_opt. This is recommended to use after testing the code.
  • 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] [-fs]
                 [-pause] [-shadow N] [-noshadow] [-drawboundings] [-simtime [min]] [-threads N]
                 [-odethread] [-osgthread] [-savecfg]
        -g interval     use guilogger (default interval 1)
        -f interval     write logging file (default interval 5)
        -m interval     use matrixviz (default interval 10)
        -s "-disc|ampl|freq val"        use soundMan
        -r seed         random number seed
        -x WxH          * window size of width(W) x height(H) is used (default 640x480)
        -fs             fullscreen mode
        -pause          start in pause mode
        -nographics             start without any graphics
        -noshadow       disables shadows and shaders (same as -shadow 0)
        -shadow [0..5]]         * sets the type of the shadow to be used
                        0: no shadow, 1: ShadowVolume, 2: ShadowTextue, 3: ParallelSplitShadowMap
                        4: SoftShadowMap, 5: ShadowMap (default)
        -shadowsize size        * sets the size of the shadow texture (default 2048)
        -drawboundings  enables the drawing of the bounding shapes of the meshes
        -simtime min    limited simulation time in minutes
        -savecfg        safe the configuration file with the values given by the cmd line
        -threads N      number of threads to use (default is the number of processors)
        -odethread      * if given the ODE runs in its own thread. -> Sensors are delayed by 1
        -osgthread      * if given the OSG runs in its own thread (recommended)
        * this parameter can be set in the configuration file ~/.lpzrobots/ode_robots.cfg
  • On some machine the program crashed right away because of graphic card incompatibilities, try: ./start -noshadow
  • Have a look at the console after starting the program, there you will find some further information for the usage of the program.
  • E. g. with Ctrl+C (on the terminal) you get a interactive console interface which can be used to modify parameters on the fly.
  • 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