IHMC Open Robotics Software

Compile: Test (3000+ tests):

Tested Platforms

Robots

• Atlas
• Valkyrie
• Nadia

Developers

Our developers are a mix of Windows and Linux users. We officially support:

• Windows 10/11
• Ubuntu 20.04+

Other GNU/Linux distros will likely work, however largely untested. macOS is partially supported, but incomplete at this time.

Branches

This repository uses the git-flow branching model. You can find more about git-flow here.

Licensing

All of the software in IHMC Open Robotics Software is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Getting Started

Developing with IHMC Open Robotics Software from source

Requirements

IHMC Open Robotics Software uses the Gradle build system, and requires JDK 17. We also strongly suggest an IDE, either Eclipse or IntelliJ (Ultimate or Community is fine). Currently, we require Gradle 7.5.1+.

Installing Gradle: https://gradle.org/install/

Companion Software

Other IHMC Libraries

IHMC Open Robotics Software both depends on and is depended on by many other IHMC Robotics Libraries. A small sampling of our other software includes:

• Simulation Construction Set 2, our own simulation environment with built-in analysis tools: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/simulation-construction-set-2
• Euclid, an alternative vector/geometry library for Java with support for additional structures common in 3D geometry without needing vecmath or Java3D: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/euclid
• Mecano, a rigid-body dynamics library built on top of Euclid and EJML: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/mecano
• IHMC YoVariables, our core data structures tools that enable the time-series tracing and analysis of Simulation Construction Set: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/ihmc-yovariables
• JOctoMap, a Java implementation of OctoMap: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/joctomap
• IHMC Realtime, a library for enabling soft real-time threading for Java on Linux using the RT_PREEMPT patches: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/ihmc-realtime
• IHMC EtherCAT Master, a Java library using IHMC Realtime and Simple Open EtherCAT Master (SOEM) that makes it simple to start a software EtherCAT Master and pure Java data structures that map to EtherCAT Slave defintions: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/ihmc-ethercat-master

You can find all of our other repositories as well as the ones above at https://github.com/ihmcrobotics

ROS API's

We provide a native ROS 2 API for many of the core components in our software stack. You can find the .msg definitions for use in your own projects in this project's ihmc-interfaces folder.

We have ROS 1 support via the ROS 2 ros1_bridge package. You can find the ROS 1 message definitions and instructions on using the ROS 1 Bridge here: https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/ihmc_msgs

IDE Support

Our Gradle models are tested in IntelliJ IDEA (both Community and Ultimate) with the Gradle plugin. Eclipse 2021 or higher with the Buildship plugin. The Buildship plugin is bundled with the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (but not Java EE Developers). It can always be manually installed to any version of Eclipse using the installation instructions.

Building .jars

IHMC Open Robotics Software is pre-configured for generating Maven publications. You can publish directly from the source code right in to your local Maven repository, e.g. the $HOME/.m2 directory. These builds will be tagged with a build "version" of "LOCAL" instead of an incrementing version number.

An example workflow for developing against a local clone of the software:

1. Clone IHMC Open Robotics Software
2. Make modifications
3. Publish to your local $HOME/.m2 repository

To publish jars to your local Maven repository:

$ cd /path/to/ihmc-open-robotics-software
$ gradle publishAll -PcompositeSearchHeight=0

To depend on the jars in your local Maven repository:

In this example we'll have a compile-time dependency of the locally built Simulation Construction Set project. In the build.gradle of the project you wish to have link against Simulation Construction Set:

repositories {
  mavenLocal()
  <your other repositories>
}

dependencies {
  api("us.ihmc:simulation-construction-set:LOCAL") {
     changing = true
  }
}

Creating a project

To create a project that uses IHMC Open Robotics Software, your project hierarchy needs to take a particular form.

First be sure you have completed the section above titled "Clone repositories".

Next, create your project folder:

mkdir -p src/ihmc/my-project-a

Follow the project setup tutorial at https://github.com/ihmcrobotics/ihmc-build#quick-project-setup.

Your directory structure should now look something like:

src/ihmc
├── my-project-a
│   └── build.gradle.kts
│   └── gradle.properties
│   └── settings.gradle.kts
├── my-project-b
│   └── ...
├── ihmc-open-robotics-software
│   └── atlas
│   └── common-walking-control-modules
│   └── ...
├── my-multi-project-c
│   └── subproject-a
│   │  └── build.gradle.kts
│   └── subproject-b
│      └── build.gradle.kts
├── ...
├── build.gradle.kts
├── gradle.properties
└── settings.gradle.kts

If this is set up correctly, you will have applied the ihmc-build plugin and use the dependency resolver methods exposed by the build extension. Alternatively, you can manually identify dependencies on projects using the normal Gradle syntax for project dependencies. A sample build.gradle dependency block:

/* Normal Gradle way */
dependencies {
  api(project(":ihmc-open-robotics-software:ihmc-java-toolkit"))
  testApi(project(":ihmc-open-robotics-software:ihmc-java-toolkit-test"))
}

/* ihmc-build way */
mainDependencies {
  api("us.ihmc:ihmc-java-toolkit:source")
}
testDependencies {
  api("us.ihmc:ihmc-java-toolkit-test:source")
}

Maintainers

• Sylvain Bertrand ([email protected])
• Duncan Calvert ([email protected])
• Stephen McCrory ([email protected])
• Robert Griffin ([email protected])
• Bhavyansh Mishra ([email protected])
• James Foster ([email protected])
• Dexton Anderson ([email protected])
• Luigi Penco ([email protected])
• Nick Kitchel ([email protected])