hengyuan-hu / robot-lightning

Robot Controllers for Research Lightning

Robot Lightning

This is accompanying code for the (research-lightning)[https://github.com/jhejna/research-lightning] repository. It provides a number of different robot controllers which interface with the robot environments in research lightning.

Desktop Setup

On the desktop computer, first create a conda environment with the desired dependencies for policy inference. Afterwards, we will setup the dependencies for robot-lightning.

First, install the library dependencies via pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Or if using conda, you may want to add these to your conda environment file.

Oculus Reader

If you want to use VR, install oculus_reader.

1. Install git lfs via pip instead of following the sudo setup instructions. This can be done with pip install git-lfs.
2. Install adb devices: sudo apt install android-tools-adb.
3. After doing this, you can clone the oculus reader repository with git clone https://github.com/rail-berkeley/oculus_reader.
4. Then, install the package from the oculus reader repo with pip install -e .

Demonstration collection

To collect demos, run

python scripts/collect_demos.py --path path/to/save/ --config path/to/robot/config

If the oculus isn't working due to adb permissions, run the following:

adb kill-server
adb start-server

NUC Setup

On the NUC, first make sure to install the intel realtime kernel. Then, follow the setup instructions for individual packages.

Polymetis

We use the monometis repo found here.

1. Create the monometis conda environment by running conda env create -f environments/nuc_monometis_env.yaml.
2. Clone the monometis repo: git clone https://github.com/hengyuan-hu/monometis/tree/main.
3. Compile the library, following these instructions:

./scripts/build_libfranka.sh
mkdir -p ./polymetis/build
cd ./polymetis/build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_FRANKA=ON
make -j
cd ../..

4. Install polymetis: pip install -e ./polymetis

Then, you can start the polymetis server as you would normally.

If you want to use ZeroRPC to wrap polymetis, you need to additionally install the robots package, then run

python scripts/start_nuc_remote.py

from the the NUC.