chisarie/iai_bullet_sim

This repository contains a Python wrapper for the PyBullet API, to easily simulate robots and their environments.

The iai_bullet_sim

This ROS package provides an object oriented wrapper around the bullet physics engine's Python interface. It is supposed to make working with bullet in Python easier and provides a small simulator which is interfaced with the ROS ecosystem.

Installation

This installation will create a new ROS workspace and use wstool to install the simulator. The instructions were tested on a Ubuntu 16.04 with ROS kinetic and cmake 3.5.1.

Creating a workspace

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash          # start using ROS kinetic
mkdir -p ~/bullet_ws/src                    # create directory for workspace
cd ~/bullet_ws                              # go to workspace directory
catkin init                                 # init workspace
cd src                                      # go to source directory of workspace
wstool init                                 # init rosinstall

Cloning simulator and Bullet using wstool

wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aroefer/iai_bullet_sim/master/rosinstall/catkin.rosinstall
                                            # update rosinstall file
wstool update                               # pull source repositories
rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths .  # install dependencies available through apt
cd ..                                       # go to workspace directory
catkin build                                # build packages
source ~/bullet_ws/devel/setup.bash         # source new overlay

Building Bullet

cd ~/bullet_ws/src/bullet3
./build_cmake_pybullet_double.sh

To use the Python bindings for Bullet, you need to add them to your PYTHONPATH. If did all of the steps above, the built library should be located in ~/bullet_ws/bullet3/build_cmake/examples/pybullet.

Documentation

Documentation and tutorials can be found here.