We're releasing most of the source code from the MIT DRC project in the hope that it will benefit the robotics community. But there are parts of this software, like the Boston Dynamics Atlas software interface, which we are not allowed to release publicly. As a result, this public repo is incomplete. Some of the submodules and external projects are private, and you won't be able to access them unless you're a member of the team. Sorry!

We're actively working on making this a project that can be used by people outside the group, but for now, you should consider it a collection of (potentially) interesting code, not a functional application.

The core algorithms and tools, however, live in their own projects which are much better supported:

• Drake (planning, control, simulation, optimization): http://drake.mit.edu
• Pronto (state estimation): https://github.com/mitdrc/pronto
• Director (user interface): https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/director

OpenHumanoids is the software platform developed by the MIT DRC team and used to compete in successive phases of the DARPA Robotics Challenge with the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. It also full supports the NASA Valkyrie and several fixed base arms.

This README describes how to download and build the OpenHumanoids source code and how to satisfy 3rd party dependencies.

MIT DRC youtube video

These instructions are written for Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit.

The DRC source code is stored in a Git repository. To download the source code you may need to first install Git on your system:

sudo apt-get install git gitk git-gui

You may need permission to access the git repository hosted on Github. To do so, create a GitHub account at Github.com if you don't already have one.

Next, add your public SSH key to your GitHub account so that you can easily push and pull over SSH. Read the generating ssh keys article for instructions to generate and link an ssh key to your account.

Download the repository with the git clone command:

git clone git@github.com:openhumanoids/main-distro.git

Initialize the submodules (Drake, director, pronto):

cd drc
git submodule update --init --recursive

Note: this may fail if you're not a member of the OpenHumanoids organization, since some submodules are private.

Add the sandbox remote. The sandbox is the location where branches can be shared.

git remote add sandbox git@github.com:drcbot/main-distro.git
git fetch sandbox

There are required 3rd party dependencies that can be satisfied by installing packages on Ubuntu. Install with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake debhelper freeglut3-dev gtk-doc-tools libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-random-dev libboost-regex-dev libboost-signals-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libfreeimage-dev libglew-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libltdl-dev libgsl0-dev libportmidi-dev libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev libqt4-dev libqwt-dev libtar-dev libtbb-dev libtinyxml-dev libxml2-dev ncurses-dev pkg-config protobuf-compiler python-matplotlib libvtk5.8 libvtk5-dev libvtk5-qt4-dev libqhull-dev python-pygame doxygen mercurial libglib2.0-dev openjdk-6-jdk python-dev gfortran f2c libf2c2-dev spacenavd libspnav-dev python-numpy python-scipy python-yaml python-vtk python-pip libgmp3-dev libblas-dev liblapack-dev libv4l-dev subversion libxmu-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev python-pymodbus graphviz curl libwww-perl libterm-readkey-perl libx264-dev libopenni-dev swig

LCM (v1.1.0) is a required dependency which must be installed from source. It can be retrived from http://lcm-proj.github.io/

wget https://github.com/lcm-proj/lcm/releases/download/v1.1.0/lcm-1.1.0.zip
unzip lcm-1.1.0.zip
cd lcm-1.1.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

LCM v1.1.1 is known to be bad. Do not try to use it.

Download Matlab r2014a from Mathworks.com. Unzip the file you just downloaded (e.g., unzip ./R2014a-linux64.zip) cd into the resulting directory sudo ./install When prompted for how to install, choose "Log in with a MathWorks Account."

Choose a "Typical" install and click next through the rest of the process. You will need to enter your Mathworks username and password during the install process, and you should see a single license that you can use for the install (this comes from a lookup of the activation key). You should have a functional MATLAB in /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014a/bin now. You can either add this directory to your PATH environment variable (e.g. in ~/.bashrc) or you can make a symlink in /usr/local/bin/ that points to the MATLAB binary - sudo ln -s /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014a/bin/matlab /usr/local/bin/matlab. If you put it in .bashrc, you'll need to source that file before matlab will be in your path (or, just start a new shell)

After installing MATLAB, two of the symlinks for libraries need to be changed:

cd /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014a/sys/os/glnxa64
ls -l

The sym links for libstdc++.so.6 and libgfortran.so.3 should point to versions in /usr/lib, not local ones.

Before changing this libraries, first make sure g++ 4.4 is installed:

sudo apt-get install g++-4.4

Now, modify the symlinks:

sudo rm libgfortran.so.3
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgfortran.so.3.0.0 libgfortran.so.3
sudo rm libstdc++.so.6
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.4/libstdc++.so libstdc++.so.6

Mosek is a solver used in the footstep planner. Obtain an academic licence from http://license.mosek.com/academic Check your email and place your license in ~/mosek/mosek.lic The Mosek code is checked out as part of the project externasl

The behavior of certain build steps can be affected by environment variables, so you should setup your environment before starting the build. The environment is setup by sourcing the file main-distro/software/config/drc_environment.sh. Typically, users will source this file automatically in their ~/.bashrc file by adding this line to ~/.bashrc:

source /path-to/main-distro/software/config/drc_environment.sh

If you have already done this, make sure your ~/.bashrc contains the correct path to the drc_environment.sh file in the drc source code directory that you just cloned with git.

Create a file ~/Documents/MATLAB/startup.m that contains the line:

run([getenv('DRC_BASE'), '/software/build/config/drc_control_setup.m'])

Make sure you have sourced the drc_environment.sh file to setup the DRC environment prior to building. If you did not source the file automatically in ~/.bashrc, then do so now with the following command:

cd main-distro
source software/config/drc_environment.sh

Run make to build externals and then the main codebase:

cd software/externals
make
cd ..
make

Nov 2015: One More Step Is currently Required

cd <path-to>/main-distro/software/build/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
ln -s lcmtypes/drake drake

** Compiling drake

Whenever making drake build it from software/drake/drake. NEVER do make in software/drake!!! But if you did it these are the steps for a clean build of drake:

cd <path-to>/main-distro/software
rm drake
cd externals
rm pod-build/src/drake-cmake-* pod-build/tmp/drake-cmake-* -Rf
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd externals
make -j 1
cd software/drake/drake
make -j

Gurobi is a solver used in our walking controller. Install its dependencies with the following commands:

apt-get install curl libwww-perl libterm-readkey-perl

Then generate an academic licence: First make an account http://www.gurobi.com/download/licenses/free-academic , then use the Gurobi key client (grbgetkey) to store the license on your machine. Place it in the suggested location (~/gurobi.lic)

The grbgetkey module is built as part of the externals.

Note that the tarball for Gurobi is part of our tree and the gurobi pod uses it to avoid needing to download it from Gurobi.

ROS is not required per se. If you would like to use this distribution in conjunction with SCS for the Valkyrie or to use EXOTica for planning and optimisation, please install ROS Indigo including MoveIt:

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full ros-indigo-moveit-full

Compile catkin workspace:

cd $DRC_BASE/catkin_ws
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

Before you run any ROS code from the catkin workspace, source the setup script:

source catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash