OpenRAVE Tutorial

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This is a steep by steep How to Use OpenRAVE Tutorial, and is intended to be a guide to learn from the scratch how to program simulations in this open source simulator. If you have some knowledge or experience on using this software, we recommend you to see the OpenRAVE Just Use It web-page.

What is OpenRAVE?

the Open Robotics Automation Virtual Environment (OpenRAVE) is an open-source cross-platform software architecture that is targeted for real-world autonomous robot applications, and includes a seamless integration of 3-D simulation, visualization, planning, scripting and control.

A plugin architecture allows users to easily write custom controllers or extend functionality. With OpenRAVE plugins, any planning algorithm, robot controller, or sensing subsystem can be distributed and dynamically loaded at run-time, which frees developers from struggling with monolithic code-bases. Users of OpenRAVE can concentrate on the development of planning and scripting aspects of a problem without having to explicitly manage the details of robot kinematics and dynamics, collision detection, world updates, and robot control. Because OpenRAVE is focused on autonomous motion planning and high-level scripting rather than low-level control and message protocols, it can be used in conjunction with other popular robotics packages such as ROS. OpenRAVE supports a powerful scripting environment based on Python which makes it simple to control and monitor the demo and environment state. There are also supported interfaces for Octave and Matlab.

What should I know before to start?

First of all, this is an unofficial Tutorial, written at VisLab in order to facilitate the usage of this tool.

Second. You can find the Official Web-page of Rosen Diankov, the creator of OpenRAVE, Here. Although you will find better first hand information in the official web-page, if you are a newbie, we better recommend to start with this tutorial that introduces gradually most of the modules that you will be using within this simulator.

Third. Although OpenRAVE is a cross-platform, this tutorial is just Linux Oriented, so, if you are a Windows user, perhaps you wont find this tutorial that useful.

The rest, is about to be LEARNED... Have some fun!!

How to Install OpenRAVE

In this section we will describe how to Install easily the OpenRAVE VisLab Edition. We call it VisLab Edition, because some plug-ins have been modified for internal purposes and also, some Models have been added to the original version of OpenRAVE. In case you want to Install the current normal version of OpenRAVE, please read the section Install OpenRAVE Normal Edition. We also strongly recommend you to download the VisLab_Scripts (a suite of shell scripts that have been written at VisLab), in order to facilitate most of the work explained in this section. To do so, just type in terminal the following:

wget http://mediawiki.isr.ist.utl.pt/images/5/5e/VisLab_Scripts.zip
mkdir $HOME/Desktop/VisLab_Scripts/
mv VisLab_Scripts.zip $HOME/Desktop/VisLab_Scripts/
cd $HOME/Desktop/VisLab_Scripts/
unzip VisLab_Scripts.zip
chmod u+x -R $HOME/Desktop/VisLab_Scripts/
rm VisLab_Scripts.zip
cd