ICub machines configuration

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

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

Operating system installation

Nothing fancy here - follow Ubuntu defaults and partitioning. For servers, use LTS releases. Machines involved in demos must have a user named 'icub', to make the distributed setup easier (so that the graphical application manager, gyarpmanager, can manage applications on remote machines).

Operations after first boot

• update packages:
  • either with Ubuntu graphical frontends
  • or from a Terminal: sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
• add 'icub' user if not done already:
  • either with Ubuntu graphical frontends
  • or from 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 like we did on Chico3; this would allow us to quickly access other machines, as in: ping cortex1. Alternatively, we can do nothing and just use ping cortex1.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/12.04/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

Edit /etc/resolv.conf like this:

  nameserver 10.0.0.1
  nameserver 10.0.0.2

Essential packages

sudo apt-get install ssh git-corelibace-dev libgsl0-dev libncurses5-dev gfortran libtinyxml-dev
sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make cmake-curses-gui qttools5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev
sudo apt-get install subversion 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 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=$code/OpenCV-2.4.8/build # manually installed, with TBB support - see below
 export PATH=$PATH:$YARP_DIR/bin:$ICUB_DIR/bin # if you only need main iCub binaries; for contrib, see http://mediawiki.isr.ist.utl.pt/wiki/RobotCub_software#Getting_the_iCub_repository_in_Linux
 source $YARP_ROOT/scripts/yarp_completion  

• 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

For security, uncomment (thus enabling) the following parameters in /etc/subversion/servers, 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. (Don't worry about changing your personal ~/.subversion/config file: the parameter is not actually set there, so the global /etc setting is used.)

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 RobotCub software article. For compilation on servers, 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).

• usual yarp CMake flags

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
 CREATE_GUIS
 CREATE_LIB_MATH

• usual iCub CMake flags

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release

Special machines such as pc104 or robot computation servers need additional flags. In addition, machines that work with the physical robot need the following setup:

1. yarp namespace /icub
2. in order to find the yarpserver running on chico3, write 10.10.1.53 10000 into the file specified by yarp conf