Installation

Real Time Setup

For being able to reliably control the robot, a real-time capable kernel is needed. See Real Time Setup in the robot_interfaces documentation.

Installation

We are providing Apptainer images for using the software, so you don’t need to install any dependencies (apart from Apptainer, of course).

There are two different scenarios described in the following:

• Basic Usage: If you just want to run your own code using this package but not modify anything in the robot interfaces packages themselves (normal user scenario).

• For Development: If you want to make modifications to the robot interfaces packages.

Basic Usage

We provide an Apptainer container with robot_interfaces_solo and all its dependencies installed:

$ apptainer pull oras://ghcr.io/open-dynamic-robot-initiative/trifinger_singularity/solo_bolt_robot:latest

Note

The packages in this container are built for real-time communication with the robot. This assumes the computer is set up accordingly (see Real Time Setup). There is an alternative container “solo_bolt_user” with a “normal” built, but you will likely run into timing-related issues if using it for controlling the robot.

You can run test/demo applications directly from that container:

$ apptainer run -e solo_bolt_robot.sif ros2 run robot_interfaces_solo solo12_show_data ./config.yml

Likewise, you can run custom scripts:

$ apptainer run -e solo_bolt_robot.sif python3 ./my_script.py

You can also built custom packages which depend on robot_interfaces_solo:

# expected directory structure:  ~/workspace/src/my_package
$ cd ~/workspace
$ apptainer shell -e path/to/solo_bolt_robot.sif
Apptainer> source /setup.bash  # Needed to setup the environment
Apptainer> colcon build

Apptainer> source install/setup.bash  # Needed to be able to use the built package
Apptainer> # now you can run executables from your package

For Development

Get the trifinger_base Apptainer container (it also contains everything needed for this package):

$ apptainer pull oras://ghcr.io/open-dynamic-robot-initiative/trifinger_singularity/trifinger_base:latest

Install treep:

$ pip install --upgrade treep

Create a workspace directory, clone the treep configuration and the project:

$ mkdir ~/my_workspace
$ cd ~/my_workspace

$ git clone git@github.com:machines-in-motion/treep_machines_in_motion.git
$ treep --clone ROBOT_INTERFACES_SOLO

Build the workspace using the Apptainer container:

$ cd ~/my_workspace/workspace
$ apptainer shell -e path/to/trifinger_user.sif
Apptainer> source /setup.bash  # Needed to setup the environment
Apptainer> colcon build

Apptainer> source install/setup.bash  # Needed to be able to use the built packages

To run an application with Apptainer:

$ cd ~/my_workspace/workspace
$ apptainer shell -e path/to/trifinger_user.sif
Apptainer> source install/setup.bash
# now you can run applications (e.g. one of the demos):
Apptainer> ros2 run robot_interfaces_solo demo_solo12_sine path/to/config.yml

Note: When running commands in the following, it is always assumed that this is done in inside the container with the setup.bash of the workspace sourced.