NMPC for Human Aerial Handover WIKI¶

• Table of contents
• NMPC for Human Aerial Handover WIKI
  • Foreword
  • Prerequisites
  • I. Software Overview
    • I.A. Openrobots
    • I.B. Robotpkg
    • I.C. GenoM
    • I.D. Pocolibs
    • I.E. TeleKyb
    • I.F. Gazebo
  • II. Installation Procedure
    • II.A. Clone the "NMPC for Human Aerial Handover" repository
    • II.B. Setup robotpkg

Foreword¶

In case of questions, queries, comments, or bug reports, feel free to use the ISSUES system or contact the corresponding authors (contact details in the project's OVERVIEW panel).

Prerequisites¶

The framework has been written and tested using Ubuntu 18.04 since it is the OS used by the LAAS-CNRS robotic platform. It should work seamlessly on a recent Linux version, but there is no guarantee.
Some issues have been found while installing the software on Ubuntu 16.04 because of version incompatibility with Protoc and Protobuf.
The installation on a non-Linux OS has to be handled by the user.

The installation assumes the use of a package manager (e.g. apt) to install some dependencies, as well as the Gazebo simulator. Everything provided in this repository or by the LAAS-CNRS robotic platform aims to be installed locally in the repository folder to avoid polluting the user's system.

Finally, to run the simulations and interface with the middleware, it is assumed to have MATLAB installed.
The provided code has been tested with MATLAB >= r2019b; other releases could be compatible but they have not been tested. If you run another version and notice any issue or that the code is compatible, please do not hesitate to contact the authors to point that out, so that this wiki can be updated.

I. Software Overview¶

I.A. Openrobots¶

Collections of all the open-source software used at LAAS. You can find more details in Openrobots Wiki-Homepage.

I.B. Robotpkg¶

Robotpkg is a packaging system for installing robotics software developed by the robotics community.
We will use robotpkg to install the required modules for the simulations (state estimation, Gazebo interface...) as well as third-party dependencies (qpOases).

I.C. GenoM¶

GenoM is a generator of modules, designed to be middleware independent, i.e. the same module can be compiled for, e.g., ROS, YARP, or Pocolibs, without any modification.
This allows a great code re-usability and abstracts the user from any specific choice of middleware.
Originally GenoM has been developed tightly with Pocolibs, then from version 3, aka GenoM3, ROS templates have been provided.

Another specificity of GenoM is the interaction with and between components.
Each component is started independently like a Linux executable (within a roscore, for ROS, or an h2 instance, for Pocolibs), then the connection between ports (or topics) is made using a supervisor, Genomix, either with MATLAB or TCL.

I.D. Pocolibs¶

Pocolibs is a middleware, like ROS.
It aims at being lighter and faster than ROS, when running on a single machine, thanks to the exploitation of shared memory. ROS, on the other hand, uses a network layer for sending messages between nodes, which leads to greater delays and loss of performance.

I.E. TeleKyb¶

The TeleKyb software platform provides the aerial-robotic oriented software developed at LAAS-CNRS.
In particular, we will use:

• mrsim, a Multi-Robot SIMulator. It is designed to be a transparent interface w.r.t. the real aerial vehicles used in LAAS-CNRS. It makes the transition between simulation and experiments seamless, from the software point of view.
• pom, a UKF-based state estimator merging state-feedback measurements of different sources (e.g. Motion Capture + IMU).
• optitrack, to export the motion capture data to the genom software stack.
• rotorcraft, the low-level interface, with either the simulated or real platform.
• nhfc, near-hovering flight controller, used for unmodeled take-off and landing.
• maneuver, a trajectory planner, providing position and attitude (as quaternions) as well as first- and second-order derivatives. It implements waypoint-to-waypoint trajectory generation.

I.F. Gazebo¶

To simulate the platform, we use the Gazebo simulator. To interface it with the genom software stack, we use two dedicated components:

• mrsim-gazebo a plugin to interface the simulated multi-rotor with the genom components (in place of mrsim).
• optitrack-gazebo emulates the optitrack network interface to publish the model poses.

The installation procedure for Gazebo can be found in the official documentation Install Gazebo using Ubuntu packages -- ver. 9.

II. Installation Procedure¶

This section is a tutorial on how to install the software architecture to run the simulations.

II.A. Clone the "NMPC for Human Aerial Handover" repository¶

Clone the repo associated with this project. Its root will act as the devel folder for the following.

git clone git://redmine.laas.fr/laas/nmpc-handover.git
cd ./nmpc-handover

To simplify the installation, we provide some environment variables in the env.sh file.
In order to run all the installed executables, we need to set up the path to the newly created folders.
We provide an env.sh script that exports all the required variables.
/!\ : the source command has to be called within this repository's root since it uses the pwd command to export the paths.

source env.sh

II.B. Setup robotpkg¶

These steps are taken from the official documentation Install.

1. Clone the robotpkg latest release.
   

   git clone git://git.openrobots.org/robots/robotpkg
   

2. Check that the openrobots/ folder exists in the repository root, and update the environement variables accordingly, if you haven't already sourced the env.sh file.
   

   export ROBOTPKG_BASE=`pwd`/openrobots
   

3. Install robotpkg.
   

   cd robotpkg/bootstrap
   ./bootstrap --prefix=$ROBOTPKG_BASE
   

4. Install the required components and their dependencies
   The installation can be done 'manually' by navigating to the desired folder in ./robotpkg/ and install with make update. Anyway, we will simplify the process using a set.
   To do so, we need to edit the config file: $ROBOTPKG_BASE/etc/robotpkg.conf. Add the following lines at the end of the file:
   

   PKG_OPTIONS.%-genom3 = \
           codels \
           pocolibs-server \
           pocolibs-client-c
   
   PKGSET.mpcset = \
       architecture/genom3 \
       architecture/genom3-pocolibs \
       localization/pom-genom3 \
       localization/optitrack-genom3 \
       hardware/joystick-genom3 \
       motion/nhfc-genom3 \
       net/genomix \
       optimization/qpoases \
       path/maneuver-genom3 \
       simulation/mrsim-gazebo \
       simulation/optitrack-gazebo \
       supervision/matlab-genomix \
       supervision/tcl-genomix \
       robots/rotorcraft-genom3
   
   PREFER.lapack = robotpkg
   PREFIX.matlab = <path/to/MATLAB>
   

The last line (<path/to/MATLAB>) needs to point to the MATLAB root folder in the system (e.g. /opt/Matlab).
It is recommended to use MATLAB for the proposed simulations since the syntax is more intuitive and comprehensible for an end-user who will modify them.
If MATLAB is not installed on the system, please install it, since the provided interface to the GenoM components is provided only in MATLAB.
Also, all the above is meant for using Pocolibs, not ROS. Future versions of this tutorial might come to use the ROS install.

Now return to the robotpkg folder and install the custom set by typing:

cd robotpkg
make update-mpcset

During the installation, some required dependencies may need to be installed with the usual package manager (e.g. apt on Ubuntu). When the install stops, install the required missing packages and re-run the command make update-mpcset.