Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
138 lines (104 loc) · 4.82 KB

INSTALL.md

File metadata and controls

138 lines (104 loc) · 4.82 KB
Raw

Usage instructions for non-NASA users

Install the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 16.04 on a host machine, and make sure that you can checkout and build code. If you are using a virtual machine, please use VMware. Virtualbox doesn't support some of our Gazebo plugins.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git

Note: You will need 4 GBs of RAM to compile the software. If you don't have that much RAM available, please use swap space.

Note: Please ensure you install the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. We do not support running Astrobee Robot Software on 32-bit systems.

Machine setup

Checkout the project source code

At this point you need to decide where you'd like to put the source code (SOURCE_PATH) on your machine:

    export SOURCE_PATH=$HOME/freeflyer

First, clone the flight software repository:

    git clone https://github.com/nasa/astrobee.git $SOURCE_PATH

If you are planning to work on guest science stuff, you will also need the astrobee_android repository. You should checkout the repository in the same directory you checked out the source code in:

    export ANDROID_PATH="${SOURCE_PATH}_android"

Clone the android repository:

    git clone https://github.com/nasa/astrobee_android.git $ANDROID_PATH

Dependencies

Next, install all required dependencies: Note: root access is necessary to install the compiled debian packages below Note: Before running this please ensure that your system is completely updated by running 'sudo apt-get update' and then 'sudo apt-get upgrade'

pushd $SOURCE_PATH
cd scripts/setup
./add_ros_repository.sh
cd debians
./build_install_debians.sh
cd ../
./install_desktop_16_04_packages.sh
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
popd

Configuring the build

Note for the build setup

By default, the configure script uses the following paths:

  • native build path: $HOME/freeflyer_build/native
  • native install path: $HOME/freeflyer_install/native

If you are satisfied with these paths, you can invoke the configure.sh without the -p and -b options. For the simplicity of the instructions below, we assume that $BUILD_PATH and $INSTALL_PATH contain the location of the build and install path. For example:

export BUILD_PATH=$HOME/freeflyer_build/native
export INSTALL_PATH=$HOME/freeflyer_install/native

Native build

The configure script prepares your build directory for compiling the code. Note that configure.sh is simply a wrapper around CMake that provides an easy way of turning on and off options. To see which options are supported, simply run configure.sh -h.

pushd $SOURCE_PATH
./scripts/configure.sh -l -F -D
popd

If you want to explicitly specify the build and install directories, use instead:

./scripts/configure.sh -l -F -D -p $INSTALL_PATH -b $BUILD_PATH

Note: Make sure you use the -F and -D flags. If these flags are not used, the code will not compile. The -F flag is used to turn off building the Picoflex. This is only needed for running on the robot and is not needed for the simulator. The -D is used to turn off building the dds bridge. The bridge is used to communicate with our ground data system and is also not needed for the simulator.

Building the code

To build, run make in the $BUILD_PATH. Note that depending on your host machine, this might take in the order of tens of minutes to complete the first time round. Future builds will be faster, as only changes to the code are rebuilt, and not the entire code base.

pushd $BUILD_PATH
make -j2
popd

If you configured your virtual machine with more than the baseline resources, you can adjust the number of threads (eg. -j4) to speed up the build.

Running a simulation

You will need to first setup your environment, so that ROS knows about the new packages provided by Astrobee flight software:

pushd $BUILD_PATH
source devel/setup.bash
popd

After this command has completed, you should be able to run a simulator from any directory in your Linux filesystem. So, for example, to start a simulation of a single Astrobee in the ISS, run the following:

roslaunch astrobee sim.launch dds:=false robot:=sim_pub rviz:=true
  • Note 1: The very first time Gazebo starts, it could take a long time because it loads some large models
  • Note 2: To run the simulation with the Gazebo rendering, you can add the flag sviz:=true. This allow to see the ISS module used for the simulation, however this is demanding more resources on your computer.

This command tells ROS to look for the sim.launch file provided by the astrobee package, and use roslaunch to run it. Internally, ROS maintains a cache of information about package locations, libraries and executables. If you find that the above command doesn't work, try rebuilding the cache:

rospack profile