ICub machines configuration

In this page we will list configurations that are commonplace to Linux machines used at Vislab to work with the iCub robot.

See VisLab machines configuration/Archive for obsolete information and environment variables.

Operating system installation

Follow Ubuntu defaults and partitioning. For servers and critical machines, use LTS releases. Machines involved in demos must have a user named icub, to make the distributed setup possible (this is required by the graphical 'yarpmanager' program). Furthermore, to use the NFS network mount, this user has to have the uid 1000 and guid 1000.

In order to add a user:

• either use the Ubuntu graphical frontends
• or use a Terminal: sudo adduser icub followed by sudo usermod -aG admin icub to give it sudo privileges

Other operations

Network configuration

See also: VisLab network, ISR computing resources.

Manually configure your internet connection as detailed in one of the following subsections, depending if the machine is a desktop or a server one.

Optionally, you may also customize the /etc/hosts file; this would allow us to quickly access other machines, as in: ping icbubrain1. Alternatively, we can do nothing and just use ping icubbrain1.visnet (i.e., attach the .visnet part after a machine name, see VisLab network for details).

Desktop machines

With the graphical Network Manager (https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-help/net-fixed-ip-address.html), configure the connection "Auto eth0" IPv4 as follows:

Address	Netmask	Gateway	DNS Servers	notes
10.10.1.x	255.255.255.0	10.10.1.254	10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2	visnet (iCub machines)
10.0.x.y	255.255.0.0	10.0.0.254	10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2	isrnet (rest of ISR)

Servers

Edit /etc/network/interfaces like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
  
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.x.y.z # put your IP here, see above table
netmask 255.255.x.y # see above table
network 10.10.1.0
broadcast 10.10.1.255
gateway 10.10.1.254
dns-nameservers 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2

In some versions of Ubuntu, to configure DNS you also need to /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head like this:

nameserver 10.0.0.1
nameserver 10.0.0.2

then run:

sudo resolvconf -u

Essential packages

sudo apt-get install libace-dev libgsl0-dev libncurses5-dev gfortran libtinyxml-dev
sudo apt-get install git-core subversion ssh gcc g++ make cmake-curses-gui
sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qtdeclarative5-controls-plugin qtmultimedia5-dev qtdeclarative5-qtmultimedia-plugin qtquick1-5-dev

The GTK versions of graphical YARP programs will be discontinued in 2015 (replaced by Qt equivalents). If you still want to obtain the old programs during compilation, do:

sudo apt-get install libgtkmm-2.4-dev

Environment variables

• Create a file called ~/.bash_env like this one:

# /usr/local/src/robot directory can be mounted from NFS, or created manually with permissions:  sudo chown icub.icub /usr/local/src/robot -R
export code=/usr/local/src/robot
export YARP_ROOT=$code/yarp
export YARP_DIR=$YARP_ROOT/build
export ICUB_ROOT=$code/icub-main
export ICUB_DIR=$ICUB_ROOT/build
export PATH=$PATH:$YARP_DIR/bin:$ICUB_DIR/bin
source $YARP_ROOT/scripts/yarp_completion
export YARP_DATA_DIRS=$YARP_DIR/share/yarp:$ICUB_DIR/share/iCub
export YARP_ROBOT_NAME=iCubLisboa01 # only for machines that connect to the real robot
export IPOPT_DIR=/home/icub/Ipopt-3.10.2/build # only for servers (IK solver) - see http://wiki.icub.org/wiki/Installing_IPOPT
export OpenCV_DIR=$code/OpenCV-2.4.8/build # manually installed, with TBB support - see below

If you need software from icub-contrib, some lines need to be added or changed:

export ICUBcontrib_DIR=$code/icub-contrib-common/build
export PATH=$PATH:$YARP_DIR/bin:$ICUB_DIR/bin:$ICUBcontrib_DIR/bin
export YARP_DATA_DIRS=$YARP_DIR/share/yarp:$ICUB_DIR/share/iCub:$ICUBcontrib_DIR/share/ICUBcontrib

• Then, before the following line of /etc/bash.bashrc

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

add this:

# per-user environment variables (non-interactive and interactive mode)
source $HOME/.bash_env

The reason why we use the above custom file (as opposed to the standard ~/.bashrc) is that we want to enforce the variables both during interactive and non-interactive sessions, such as commands launched via yarprun from another machine.

Subversion

Set the following in /etc/subversion/config:

### To disable all password stores, use an empty list:
password-stores =

Set the following in /etc/subversion/servers, at the bottom in the [global] section:

store-passwords = no
store-plaintext-passwords = no

This implies that SVN will ask you for your password every time you do a commit, as opposed to storing it in plain text on the system.

Additional software

OpenCV

Ubuntu packages

 sudo apt-get install libcv-dev libhighgui-dev libcvaux-dev libopencv-gpu-dev

This is the easiest way to install OpenCV, however some machines may require a custom manual compilation instead (see below).

Manual compilation

This is needed for some iCub vision modules (e.g. motionCUT, stereoDisparity). Instructions:

• download TBB Source, make
• download OpenCV 2.4.3 or higher, CMake, set WITH_TBB=ON and insert the paths obtained with the TBB compilation, such as

 TBB_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/src/robot/tbb41_20130314oss/include
 TBB_LIB_DIR=/usr/local/src/robot/tbb41_20130314oss/build/linux_intel64_gcc_cc4.6_libc2.15_kernel3.2.0_release

• compile OpenCV

• set OpenCV_DIR to the path of OpenCV-x.y.z/build, for example:

export OpenCV_DIR=$code/OpenCV-2.4.3/build

If the above fails, try BUILD_TBB=ON (i.e. automatically "Download and build TBB from source"). More information about TBB support in the latest OpenCV here.

Possible problems with manual compilation

error: ‘ptrdiff_t’ does not name a type

Solution: edit OpenCV-x.y.z/modules/core/include/opencv2/core/core.hpp, add #include <stddef.h>

fatal error: linux/videodev.h: No such file or directory

Solution:

sudo apt-get install libv4l-dev
cd /usr/include/linux
sudo ln -s ../libv4l1-videodev.h videodev.h

undefined reference to `cvCreateCameraCapture_V4L(int)'

Solution: see here (including the change suggested in the comments)

error: ‘AVERROR_NUMEXPECTED’ was not declared in this scope

Solution: apply the two patches located here with the following commands.

wget https://code.ros.org/trac/opencv/raw-attachment/ticket/1020/ffmpeg_build.patch https://code.ros.org/trac/opencv/raw-attachment/ticket/1020/ffmpeg_build_2.patch
patch -p1 < ffmpeg_build.patch
# when asked for which file to patch, give the full path to OpenCV-x.y.z/modules/highgui/src/cap_ffmpeg.cpp
patch -p1 < ffmpeg_build_2.patch
# ditto

error: ‘av_rescale_q’ was not declared in this scope

Solution: edit OpenCV-x.y.z/modules/highgui/src/cap_ffmpeg.cpp, add #include <libavutil/mathematics.h> before #include <ffmpeg/avcodec.h> (source)

error: #error The Eigen/Array header does no longer exist in Eigen3. All that functionality has moved to Eigen/Core.

Solution: apply the patch located here with the following commands.

wget https://code.ros.org/trac/opencv/raw-attachment/ticket/805/diff.txt
patch -p1 < diff.txt
# when asked for which file to patch, give the full path to OpenCV-x.y.z/modules/features2d/src/matchers.cpp

No rule to make target `/usr/lib/python3.0/config/libpython3.0.so', needed by `lib/cv.so'.

Solution: ccmake ., toggle advanced options (press 't'), set

PYTHON_LIBRARY /usr/lib/python2.7/config/libpython2.7.so

error: ‘avformat_free_context’ was not declared in this scope

Solution: remove any manually installed ffmpeg version, then

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev

YARP and iCub

Follow the instructions on the iCub software article. When compiling, do not use sudo make install but simply make (we have configured the PATH variable to find the latest compiled binaries, and we do not want two copies of the same thing on the system).

• yarp CMake configuration

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
CREATE_GUIS
CREATE_LIB_MATH

// to enable 640x480@30Hz images with Bayer encoding
// install libraw1394-dev libdc1394-22-dev then enable
CREATE_OPTIONAL_CARRIERS
ENABLE_yarpcar_bayer_carrier

• icub-main CMake configuration

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
// on servers, do http://wiki.icub.org/wiki/Installing_IPOPT then enable
ENABLE_icubmod_cartesiancontrollerclient ON
ENABLE_icubmod_cartesiancontrollerserver ON
ENABLE_icubmod_gazecontrollerclient ON

• final configuration

1. yarp namespace /icub
2. in order to find the yarpserver running on iCub laptop, write 10.10.1.53 10000 into the file specified by yarp conf

• special machines such as pc104 need different flags

See also

• http://wiki.icub.org/wiki/Generic_iCub_machine_installation_instructions