VMRobotControl.jl

VMRobotControl allows you to build dynamic controllers for your robot as intuitive virtual mechanisms. You design your controller by building a virtual mechanism. You connect the virtual mechanism to the robot through compliant elements (like springs and dampers). The control action is automatically translated to the robot actuators (desired joint forces/torques).

This package is designed for building, simulating and controlling robots using passivity-based controllers represented by virtual mechanisms. This is in the tradition of virtual model control and energy shaping/damping injection. For a defined robot geometry, you can select specific coordinates and connect components to shape the robot dynamic properties. properties. This provides a simple way to program complex robot behaviour incrementally, from mechanical primitives.

Installation

Julia must be installed, I recommend using juliaup. VMRobotControl.jl is only tested on the latest julia version.

Then, from the Julia REPL run:

using Pkg
Pkg.add("VMRobotControl")

To load the package, use the command:

using VMRobotControl

Developer installation

Then clone the github repository, and navigate to the repos's root folder in a terminal, e.g.

git clone [email protected]:Cambridge-Control-Lab/VMRobotControl.jl.git

Run julia and hit the ] key to enter the Pkg context for managing packages/environments. Run the following sequence of commands:

registry update
develop ./VMRobotControl.jl

This updates the package registry from online, then marks the folder VMRobotControl.jl as a package under development. To check things are working, while still in the Pkg context, you can run the packages self-tests by activating the packages environment, and running test

activate ./VMRobotControl.jl
test

Manually building documentation

We recommend reading the docs online, but you can also build them locally. To do so, activate the docs environment, from the VMRobotControl.jl folder:

activate docs
add DifferentialEquations, Documenter, FileIO, ForwardDiff, GLMakie, Literate, LiveServer, MeshIO, StaticArrays

Then, run the contents of ./docs/make.jl...

include("./docs/make.jl")

and host them using LiveServer.jl:

include("./docs/host.jl")