Installation Issues

  The legged robot controller requires of the following items to work properly:

 
• A machine running under Solaris (Sun) or Irix (SGI) operating system. Up to now the simulator has not been tested under Linux but it should work.
• The simulator package.
• The Geomview 3D visualization program properly installed [7]. 
• The Xforms library installed [16]. 
• The GNU C compiler. 

To install the simulator package   copy the file legsim.tar.gz in one of your directories and type

• gunzip legsim.tar.gz
• tar xf legsim.tar

This creates a directory called sim containing:  

• Some makefiles: The common part is in makefile and the parts depending on the machine are in make.sun, make.sgi). This second one is the one to be used as a base to personalize when working under Linux. In this case, some of the directory names that appear in the makefile should be modified (for instance, the /usr/openwin/ directory should be changed to /usr/X11R6/)    
• Some scripts: compile and sim. They are provided to easy the compilation and execution of the simulator with different robot controller. Their use is explained below.   
• The main program: It is named lrs for Legged Robot Simulator. This program is invoked from Geomview as an external module and implement the main loop of the simulator as well as the user interface management. If you run it directly you will obtain the same user interface, no graphic output, and a long sequence of geometric commands appearing in the standard output (these are the ones received and processed by Geomview during a normal execution). In the distributed package, this program is no present since it would be generated the first time the simulator is compiled.  
• Simulator configuration file: sim.cfg. In indicates which ground, robot and set of landmarks to load at startup.  
• The grounds directory: Containing ground descriptions. Its syntax is described in section 2.2.1. 
• The robots directory: Includes robot descriptions. Its syntax is described in section 2.2.3. 
• The landmarks directory: Includes pre-defined sets of landmarks. Its syntax is described in section 2.2.2. 
• The obj directory: Used to store the objects resulting form the compilation. Deleting the files in this directory (for instance executing make clean in the command line) forces the complete re-compilation of the simulator code.
• The doc directory: Contains this document.
• The controller directories: Each user programmed controller is stored in a different directory. Two controllers are provided with the simulator: user_skel (that is just an empty controller) and user_tripod that contains the controller described in section 3.2.17. 

To compile a new controller you can use:

compile directory_name 

where directory_name is the name of the directory containing the controller to be compiled. For instance you can type

compile user_tripod

to compile the simulator with the controller described in section 3.2.17.

To run the simulator just type

sim 

in the command line.