mcx / xpp

Visualization of Motions for Legged Robots in ros-rviz

Xpp is a ROS package for the visualization of motion-plans for legged robots. It draws support areas, contact forces and motion trajectories in RVIZ and displays URDFs for specific robots, including a one-legged, a two-legged hopper and HyQ. More example motions can be seen in this video, generated by the library towr.

Install

The recommended way to install is through the ROS binaries:

sudo apt-get install ros-<ros-distro>-xpp

Build from source

In case you don't want to install from the ROS binaries, this package requires Eigen and ROS:

sudo apt-get install ros-<ros-distro>-desktop-full
sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev

Then you can build the package in your catkin workspace

cd catkin_workspace/src
git clone https://github.com/leggedrobotics/xpp.git
cd ..
catkin_make
source ./devel/setup.bash

Unit Tests

Make sure everything installed correctly by running the unit tests through

catkin_make run_tests

or if you are using catkin tools.

catkin build xpp_vis --no-deps --verbose --catkin-make-args run_tests

Usage

A few examples for different robots are provided in the xpp_examples package, e.g. xpp_examples/src/monoped_pub.cc. For starters, run

roslaunch xpp_examples hyq_bag.launch  // or any other launch file in this package

Add your own Robot

Want to visualize your own robot, then checkout these instructions and we're happy to receive your pull-request. See here the list of contributors who participated in this project.

Authors

Alexander W. Winkler - Initial Work/Maintainer

The work was carried out at the following institutions:

               

Citation

If you use this work in an academic context, please cite as follows:

@misc{xpp_ros,
  author = {Alexander W. Winkler},
  title  = {{Xpp - A collection of ROS packages for the visualization of legged robots}},
  year   = {2017},
  doi    = {10.5281/zenodo.1037901},
  url    = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1037901}
}

Bugs & Feature Requests

Please report bugs, request features or ask questions using the Issue Tracker.