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Getting started

An overview of how to set up the repository, virtual environment, and pip dependencies

Prerequisites

Information on installing software prerequisites can be found here

Once these are installled, continue with the setup process

Cloning the repo

cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/danielpmorton/pyastrobee

Virtual environment

A virtual environment is optional, but highly recommended. Pyenv was found to work a bit better than conda here. 

# pyenv install 3.10.8 (if not already installed)
pyenv virtualenv 3.10.8 astrobee
pyenv shell astrobee

Install dependencies

Install all packages except for pybullet:

cd $HOME/pyastrobee
pip install -e .

Install pybullet from source:

export BULLET_DIR=$HOME/software/bullet3  # Can change this install location as desired
git clone https://github.com/danielpmorton/bullet3 $BULLET_DIR
cd $BULLET_DIR
git remote add upstream https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3
./build_cmake_pybullet_double.sh  # Locally build Bullet/Pybullet
pip install .

After doing this, open a python interpreter and run the following commands:

import pybullet
pybullet.isNumpyEnabled()

The isNumpyEnabled() line should return 1. If not, pip uninstall pybullet, then make sure that numpy is installed in your current environment, and retry the pip installation seen above.

Interacting with the Astrobee

With everything installed, confirm that things are loading properly:

  • For an interactive keyboard-based demo of the Astrobee inside the ISS, run pyastrobee/control/keyboard_controller.py
  • Alternatively, check out pyastrobee/scripts/demo.py for an example of how to control the Astrobee in a script