On-line POMDP Planning Toolkit (OPPT)

OPPT

On-line POMDP Planning Toolkit (OPPT) is a C++ software-toolkit for approximating POMDP solutions on-line. To ease implementation of POMDP models, OPPT allows users to specify the state, action, and observation spaces via a configuration file, and uses a plug-in architecture to implement the core components of a POMDP, that is, the transition, observation and reward functions.

Installing the dependencies

On-line installation script

OPPT provides an installation script that installs all the dependencies:

cd <oppt_root_folder>
chmod +x install_dependencies.sh && . ./install_dependencies.sh --use-ros

This script will install the dependencies inside the /usr/local folder, hence, it will ask you for your sudo password. It has been tested on a clean Ubuntu 16.04 installation. If you wish to not install the optional ROS Kinetic dependency, run the above command without the "--use-ros" option.

Step-by-step installation

1. Install the core dependencies

    sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake mercurial pkg-config libboost-all-dev libtinyxml-dev libeigen3-dev libassimp-dev libfcl-dev
   

2. Install the Gazebo dependencies

    sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'
    wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
    sudo apt-get update
    wget https://bitbucket.org/osrf/release-tools/raw/default/jenkins-scripts/lib/dependencies_archive.sh -O /tmp/dependencies.sh
    ROS_DISTRO=kinetic GAZEBO_MAJOR_VERSION=7 . /tmp/dependencies.sh
    sudo apt-get install $(sed 's:\\ ::g' <<< $BASE_DEPENDENCIES) $(sed 's:\\ ::g' <<< $GAZEBO_BASE_DEPENDENCIES)
    sudo apt-get install libsdformat4 libsdformat4-dev libignition-math2-dev libignition-math2 gazebo7 libgazebo7-dev
   

3. Download and install libspatialindex-1.8.5

    wget http://download.osgeo.org/libspatialindex/spatialindex-src-1.8.5.tar.gz
    tar zxfv spatialindex-src-1.8.5.tar.gz
    cd spatialindex-src-1.8.5
    mkdir build && cd build
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..
    make -j2 && sudo make install
   

4. (Optional) If you want to use the GUI provided in OPPT, you need to have a working installation of ROS Kinetic (at least the ROS-base stack along with the ros-kinetic-rviz stack). Furthermore your ROS environment has to be set up (please refer to http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu section 1.6). If you do not have ROS Kinetic installation, you can install it using

    sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ros-base ros-kinetic-rviz
   

Setting-up ROS Kinect (optional)

If you have a working ROS Kinetic installation, make sure that the ROS environment is set-up properly. For a clean ROS installation, this is done via

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.sh

If you fail to do this, you won't be able to use the viewer.

Building and installing OPPT

cd <oppt_root_folder>/src/
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=<BUILD_TYPE> -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<oppt_install_location> ..
make && make install

OPPT supports three build types: Debug, RelWithDebInfo and Release. The default build type is RelWithDebInfo

Configuring the OPPT runtime environment

In order to obtain resources such as SDF models, plugins, etc., OPPT uses a filesystem API

oppt::FileExists("filename")
oppt::FindFile("filename")

which locates resources inside folders specified in the

OPPT_RESOURCE_PATH

environment variable. To configure your current environment, either call

source <oppt_install_location>/share/oppt/setup.sh

or add this line to your bash environment file

This will add the

<oppt_install_location>/share/oppt/models
<oppt_install_location>/share/oppt/plugins

folders to the resource environment variable. If you want to add additional folders, use

export OPPT_RESOURCE_PATH=$OPPT_RESOURCE_PATH:<additional_folder>

Quick start

After the OPPT environment has been configured, navigate to the

<oppt_root_folder>/bin

directory. Here you should see the 'abt' executable. If you have installed the optional ROS Kinetic dependency, you should see two additional executables, 'viewer' and 'playVideo'. The problem configuration files for the problems that ship with OPPT are inside the

<oppt_root_folder>/cfg

directory. To run the ABT solver for any of the problems, run

./abt --cfg <oppt_root_folder>/cfg/<ProblemConfigurationFile>.cfg

Note that the path to the problem configuration file must be an absolute path.

If you want a visualization of the simulation runs, open a separate terminal and run

opptViewer

BEFORE running the ABT solver.

Documentation

The OPPT HTML documentation can be found inside the

<oppt_root_folder>/docs/html

folder

Changelog

v0.1

• Initial public release