python bindings to rai

This repo builds python bindings to rai, including a Pypi wheel.

Documentation

Although very incomplete, the best intro to the code is found as part of the robotics-course documentation. Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate the use are found in the rai tests and in tutorials/.

Installation via pip

• The pip package was compiled for python3.6 .. 3.10, and most of the dependencies statically linked. A few are still loaded dynamically, which requires installing on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install liblapack3 freeglut3 libglew-dev python3 python3-pip

• pip-install robotic and dependencies (numpy, scipy)

python3 -m pip install robotic numpy scipy

• Test:

python3 -c 'from robotic import ry; ry.test.RndScene()'

If the rai-robotModels path fails, try something like

python3 -c 'from robotic import ry; ry.setRaiPath("/usr/local/rai-robotModels"); ry.test.RndScene()'

• You can download other examples and test:

wget https://github.com/MarcToussaint/rai-python/raw/master/examples/skeleton-solving-example.py
python3 skeleton-solving-example.py

Installation from source

This assumes a standard Ubuntu 20.04 (or 18.04) machine.

• Clone the repo:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/MarcToussaint/rai-python.git
cd rai-python

• Install Ubuntu packages. The following should do this automatically; if you don't like this, call make -j1 printUbuntuAll to see which code components depend on which Ubuntu packages, and install by hand.

sudo apt-get update
make -C rai -j1 installUbuntuAll  # calls sudo apt-get install; you can always interrupt

• Install python packages, including pybind:

echo 'export PATH="${PATH}:$HOME/.local/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc   #add this to your .bashrc, if not done already
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-numpy python3-pip python3-distutils
pip3 install --user --upgrade pip
pip3 install --user jupyter nbconvert matplotlib pybind11

• Compile using cmake:

ln -s build_utils/CMakeLists-ubuntu.txt CMakeLists.txt
make -C rai cleanAll
make -C rai unityAll
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j $(command nproc)

• Test a first notebook, then checkout all notebooks in notebooks/ and rai/test/ry

jupyter-notebook tutorials/1-basics.ipynb

• Other tests

cd examples
python3 skeleton-solving-example.py

Building a wheel within a manylinux docker

• Build the docker

cd build_utils
./build-docker.sh

• Run docker and compile wheels inside

./run-docker.sh
## inside docker:
cd local #this mounts rai-python/
build_utils/build-wheel.sh
exit

• Outside of docker, install locally with pip or push wheels to pypi

python3.7 -m pip install dist/robotic-*cp37*.whl --force-reinstall
python3.10 -m pip install dist/robotic-*cp310*.whl --force-reinstall
# or
twine upload dist/*.whl