peterdavidfagan/tutorials

Tutorials for ARO course 23-34 at the University Of Edinburgh

Advanced Robotics (INFR112132022) tutorials

These instructions are written for ARO tutorials regarding set up on DICE environment. A large part of these tutorials are adapted from Nicolas Mansard's class at Supaero, 2023.

The exercices are organized by notebook. Each notebook corresponds to one chapter of the class. The notebooks are in Python and based on the software Pinocchio.

Set up

On a DICE machine

On DICE, we will clone the tutorials repository and install the required dependencies to run the tutorials. You can "clone" the project to a local folder of your choice. Open a terminal (CTRL + ALT + T) and follow the commands below:

• Move to home directory.

cd ~

• Create the aro23 directory if not already done

mkdir -p aro23 && cd aro23

• Clone the tutorials inside your home directory.

git clone https://github.com/ediaro23/tutorials/

• Install dependencies

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

You should be done! See below to check that your installation is working

Linux, Python 3, PyPI

On a Linux system with Python 3.8, you can get the dependencies directly with +pip (see installation procedure and update below):

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

NB: you should consider using a virtualenv

Once you have the dependencies, you can start the server with jupyter notebook

Using Docker

TBD...

Using and updating the notebooks

Running a notebook

On your terminal, cd into the tutorials folder:

cd  ~/aro23/tutorials/

Now run Jupyter notebook with the command

jupyter notebook .

Click on '0_introduction_to_numerical_robotics.ipynb' to open the first notebook.

Editing the notebook and updates

To avoid conflicts (see right after), it is recommended to make a local copy of a notebook before working on it.

If the repository changes (for example when new tutorials are pushed / a bug has been found), you will need to update your local version by "pulling" it from the repository. On a native installation, just go in the folder containing the tutorials and execute git pull

Side notes

Installing pip

Pip is a tool for installing and managing Python packages. You can install it with

sudo apt install python3-pip

The default version of +pip installed by +apt is not up to date, so upgrade it with

python3 -m pip install --upgrade --user

In general, running +pip is likely to run an alias on +pip in /usr, so either run it through python3 as explained above, or make sure your path select the right pip executable in your ~/.local. The option --user is kind of optional for recent +pip version, but removing it should work with a warning.