Running kuka tests with Crocoddyl Instructions

Environment Setup (Ubuntu, the gepetto-gui is not compatible with Mac)

I couldn't get the setup to work correctly using venv, using conda appears to be a lot easier, because there are non-python system packages which need to be installed to run the gepetto viewer, and maybe for other parts of this as well.

Install the dependencies mentioned in the Gepetto readme: https://github.com/Gepetto/gepetto-viewer

sudo apt install openscenegraph
sudo apt install qtbase5-dev qt5-qmake

Then install the viewer itself:

conda install gepetto-viewer gepetto-viewer-corba -c conda-forge

I ended up installing pinocchio directly after wrestling with it for a while, I think crocoddyl should install this for you though:

conda install pinocchio -c conda-forge

But then installing from Conda should work:

conda install crocoddyl -c conda-forge

Run the arm_manipulation script in the examples/notebooks directory to make sure the installation worked correctly.

We also need the package to get a pinocchio-compatible description of the IIWA robot, this one isn't included as part of Crocoddyl. So install that with Conda also:

conda install -c conda-forge robot_descriptions

Notes about installation issues

I have burned a lot of time trying g to install crocoddyl in differetn ways on two different machines. On Ubuntu 20.04, after installing directly with conda-forge, I was not able to import the package into a python interpreter. This was true on both python 3.11 and python 3.10. With python 3.8, it worked, and I was able to import the pakcage successfully. However, all I could install into the conda env was version 1.7 of crocoddyl, which appears to be very out of date, and important classes I tried to import into c++, like https://gepettoweb.laas.fr/doc/loco-3d/crocoddyl/master/doxygen-html/classcrocoddyl_1_1ResidualModelStateTpl.html, coulnd't be included. I think the solution is to use Ubuntu 22.04, python 3.10 or 3.11.

Running the test

In one terminal, run the gepetto-gui. Assuming it was installed correctly:

gepetto-gui

There often seem to be errors and warnings of the forms:

libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile

and

Error reading file /home/a2rlab/anaconda3/envs/crocoddyl/share/gepetto-viewer/fonts/arial.ttfQOpenGLContext::swapBuffers() called with non-exposed window, behavior is undefined

Neither of these seem to matter, the visualization can still run properly.

Once that is running, execute the test_iiwa.py script to solve a trajectory optimization problem using the Crocoddyl DDP solver.