Installing

Installing DisCoBotS

The usual way to use DisCoBotS is by grabbing the source code and compiling it. There are no precompiled binaries or packages at the moment, as working with the simulator involves re-compiling parts of it from time to time (the simulator has no plugin framework for controllers, yet. Feel free to add one ;-).
Currently the simulator will work under linux systems, only. But if anyone wants to port it to other operating systems, which shouldn't be much of a problem, that would be appreciated.

Requirements:

This is a list of the required libraries / tools you need to build / use the simulator:

Simulator

• CMake
• Bullet Physics (tested with 2.77, 2.78, 2.79)
• Ogre3D (>=1.7 (Cthugha))
• Boost (thread, regex)
• libxml2

Python Interface (optional

• libreadline
• Boost (python)

OpenMPI based Network Interface (optional)

• OpenMPI

Telnet Network Interface (optional)

• Boost (asio)

Documentation (optional)

• Doxygen

The simulator heavily relies on the graphics hardware for simulating sensor values, so you should have a fairly good (what ever this means) graphics card with GLSL Shader support.

Installation HowTo for Ubuntu

1. Install dependencies:
   Most of the required libraries/tools can be installed from the ubuntu repositories. A complete list would be (hopefully):

   sudo apt-get install\
   build-essential\
   cmake-curses-gui\
   libboost-thread-dev\
   libboost-regex-dev\
   libboost-python-dev\
   libxml2-dev\
   libois-dev\
   libreadline-dev\
   python-dev\
   libopenmpi-dev\
   openmpi-bin\
   doxygen
   

   If you want to compile OGRE and Bullet yourself, you need some additional packages:

   sudo apt-get install\
   libxaw7-dev\
   libfreetype6-dev\
   libgl1-mesa-dev\
   libzzip-dev\
   libfreeimage-dev\
   libxrandr-dev\
   libglu1-mesa-dev
   

2. Compiling and installing Bullet:

   1. Get the latest bullet physics source and extract it somewhere
   2. Create a new folder "build" inside the newly extracted directory
   3. Inside the folder "build" run "cmake ..", then "make" and finally "sudo make install"

3. Compiling and installing OGRE:
   You can install Ogre from launchpad.
   It currently also ships with its own version of libboost, so watch out for conflicting package versions.
   Alternatively you can also:

   1. Get the latest ogre3d source and extract it somewhere
   2. same as 2.2
   3. same as 2.3

4. Compiling the simulator:

   1. Get the source and extract it (You probably did this already)
   2. Change to folder "build"
   3. Inside the folder "build" run "cmake ..", then "make"

5. Creating Documentation:
   You can issue "make doc" inside the "build" folder. This creates a directory "doc" containing very very little documentation ;-)

For further instructions on running the simulator and creating own robots/controllers, see the README file in the source code.

This project is still in pre-alpha, any feedback is highly appreciated.