Beautiful Bullet

Dedicated to whom still likes C++...

Nowadays there are many physics engine. Among the open-source ones Bullet is still one of the best in terms of performances and features availability. Nevertheless, despite having a core written in C/C++, if you really want to use Bullet you have to go for the python wrapper. Trying to use the "core" version is a bit of a nightmare. The code is very messy and almost all the features you would need for basic robotic application are very confusingly coded in the examples. Features like URDF importing, Rigid Body algorithms and even the graphical interface are at the moment available only as examples. In order to make everything works outside from the Bullet you might easily carry over hundreds of sources files dependent on each other.

This repository intends to be a wrapper around ONLY the core of Bullet. It allows to quickly setup your robotic simulation in C++ and test your controllers.

In order to achieve that depends on the following:

eigen (https://gitlab.com/libeigen/eigen), template library for linear algebra. It is used as standard for all the math objects;
urdfdom (https://github.com/ros/urdfdom), standard ROS XML parser. It is used to import any urdf file into Bullet btMultiBody object;
assimp (https://github.com/assimp/assimp), library to import various 3D model formats. It used to load 3D meshed and create the collision objects in Bullet;
pinocchio (https://github.com/stack-of-tasks/pinocchio), state-of-the-art implementation of many Rigid Body Algorithms. At the moment it is used to provide functionalities as Jacobian computation, inverse kinematics solution and frame position derivation;
(optional) graphics-lib (https://github.com/nash169/graphics-lib), my wrapper around magnum. Magnum is a fast, lightweight OpenGL library. It is used to provide a graphical interface to the simulator.

The library is still in its early stages and many other Bullet features remain to be implemented.

ToDo

Fix Franka URDF (problem with prismatic links hand)
Check memory allocation
Add visualization collision objects (implement imgui in graphics-lib)
Add flags when loading multibody collision shapes
Move to shared ptr for bodies internal controllers as well

Usage

Work in progress. Check the examples to get started.

Dependencies

See the corresponding installation instructions for the libraries listed above.

In addition, in order to compile the project, install my waf-tools.

Installation

Compile and install using waf commands

waf configure build

waf configure && waf

Install the library (optional)

(sudo) waf install

If you want to make a clean installation

(sudo) waf distclean configure build install

Compilation options

In order to set the desired compiler define the environment variable CXX=<g++,clang++,icpc> (gnu, clang and intel compiler respectively).

Compile in debug mode (without AVX support)

waf configure --debug

Compile static library (default option)

waf configure --static

Compile shared library

waf configure --shared

Define a specific installation path

waf configure --prefix=/path/to/install/folder

Finding the library

In case you want to use this library in your project the waf tool necessary to automatically detect it is already included in my waf-tools repository.

Examples

Once the library is compiled all the examples can be run with

./build/src/examples/<name_example>

Certain examples depend on utils-lib, control-lib and graphics-lib.

nash169 / beautiful-bullet Goto Github PK