Getting Started

Quick Install

Install the robotic python package. On a standard Ubuntu, the following should be sufficient:

sudo apt install liblapack3 freeglut3 libglew-dev python3 python3-pip
python3 -m pip install robotic

A standard test is

python3 -c 'import robotic as ry; print("ry version:", ry.__version__, ry.compiled());'
python3 -c 'import robotic as ry; ry.test.RndScene()'

Compiling from source, cmd line tools, & docstrings

  • Compiling for the real robot: The robotic pip package does not have the real robot drivers (for the Franka Panda robot) included, and therefore only supports simulation mode. However, the interface and code is designed so that everything directly transfers to the real robot: All you have to do is re-compile the python package on your machine, including the libfranka and librealsense drivers. This is done by installing the robotic package.

  • Command line tools: There are currently three little cmd line tools, which should be in ~/.local/bin:

    • ry-view: to view robot/scene model files (see this tutorial)

    • ry-bot: to test basic operations with the real robot (have a look at help and simple source)

    • urdf2rai.py: to help convert from urfl to model files (see, again, this tutorial)

  • Docstrings and tab completion: The package comes with a ‘stubs’ file (should be in ~/.local/lib/python*/site-packages/robotic/_robotic.ipy), which includes docstrings most methods and should enable autocompletion in your IDE. The docstrings are not yet great for all methods.

    If tab-autocomplete for jupyter does not work, try python3 -m pip install jedi==0.17.2

Downloading the tutorial notebooks

git clone https://github.com/MarcToussaint/rai-tutorials.git
cd rai-tutorials
jupyter-notebook .

If you don’t have jupyter installed yet:

pip3 install --user jupyter nbconvert matplotlib