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Setting up PyCRAM

The setup of PyCRAM can be differentiated in three steps:

  • Install ROS
  • Installing Dependencies
  • Cloning the PyCRAM repo

All dependencies are available via PyPi

PyCRAM is developed and tested with Python3.8, Ubuntu 20.04 and ROS Melodic

Installing ROS

PyCRAM uses ROS for a variety of functionality, for this reason you need a working ROS installation on your machine. For information on how to install ROS please referee to the offical documentation here.

Dependencies

To install PyCRAM firstly the required packages must be installed. These are:

  • Pip
  • CRAM/kdl_ik_service
  • pybullet
  • Pathlib
  • numpy
  • urdfpy
  • graphviz
  • urdf-parser-py

Firstly Pip needs to be installed, on Ubuntu this can be done vie the following command:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

PyCRAM uses the the KDL Inverse Kinematic service of CRAM, to use the IK service CRAM needs to be installed. For instructions on how to install CRAM click here.

The rest can be installed using Pip by typing the following command into a terminal:

pip3 install <DEPENDENCY> 

PyCRAM

To get PyCRAM simply clone the repository with the following command into your ROS workspace:

cd <Path to your ROS workspace>
cd src/
git clone https://github.com/cram2/pycram.git
cd pycram/
git submodule init
git submodule update

The cloned repository contains the source code for PyCRAM as well as two short demos which demonstrate how to use it.

Building your ROS workspace

Building and sourcing your ROS workspace using catkin compiles all ROS packages and manages the appending to the respective PATH variables. This is necessary to be able to import PyCRAM via the Python import system and to find the robot descriptions in the launch file.

You can build your ROS workspace with the following commands:

cd <Path to your ROS workspace>
catkin_make
source devel/local_setup.bash