/director

A robotics interface and visualization framework, with extensive applications for working with http://drake.mit.edu

Primary LanguagePythonBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

Director

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

The Director is a robotics interface and visualization framework.

It includes applications for working with Drake, and includes the primary user interface used by Team MIT in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Team MIT DRC day-1 visualization

The Director is a collection of C++ and Python libraries and applications. Many components from this repository are usable out-of-the-box, but some require additional components from the greater MIT DRC codebase.

As of this writing, the software is supported on Ubuntu 14.04, MacOSX 10.10, and Microsoft Windows 8 using the system native compilers. It likely also works on similar platforms and OS versions.

The source code is stored in a Git repository. To download the source code you may need to first install Git on your system. On Mac, we recommend using Homebrew. On Windows, download the official git package from https://git-scm.com

Download the repository with the git clone command:

git clone https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/director.git

The required 3rd party dependencies are:

  • Qt 4.8
  • VTK 5.8 or 5.10
  • Python 2.7 and numpy

Additionally, you will need CMake 2.8 or greater to configure the source code.

The dependencies can be installed on Mac using Homebrew:

brew tap homebrew/python
brew tap patmarion/director
brew install cmake python numpy vtk5 eigen

The dependencies can be installed on Ubuntu using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install cmake libvtk5-qt4-dev libeigen3-dev python-dev python-vtk python-numpy
make superbuild

This is an alias for:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../distro/superbuild

A preliminary Online Help for the Director (currently in preparation) can be found here.

If you wish to cite the director, please use:

@misc{director,
  author = "Pat Marion",
  title = "Director: A robotics interface and visualization framework",
  year = 2015,
  url = "http://github.com/RobotLocomotion/director"
}