Robot Manipulation

Perception, Planning, and Control

http://manipulation.csail.mit.edu/

Installation

Please follow the installation instructions in drake.html. Make sure that you have done a recursive checkout in this repository, or have run

git submodule update --init --recursive

To Run the Unit Tests

macOS Mojave (10.14) and macOS Catalina (10.15)

bazel test //...

Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic)

bazel test //...

To Cite

Russ Tedrake. Robot Manipulation: Perception, Planning, and Control (Course Notes for MIT 6.881). Downloaded on [date] from http://manipulation.mit.edu/.

Notes / tips / tricks

In most notebooks I launch a single meshcat server (as a subprocess) in the first cell. Especially when I'm working in VS Code, I end up with an accumulation of meshcat server instances hanging around. Running an occasional

pkill -f meshcat

will clean them up.

For lecturing

New proposed solution (attendees only have to look at slides.com + my video via zoom):

• Zoom from either computer
• ipad connects to http://wbo.ophir.dev; I add link to the private board in my slides.com
  • alternatives i considered:
    • goodnotes. this will be the best if/when it's "realtime sharing" (released Dec 2020) becomes iframable.
    • AWW app (probably needs $9/month edu license. writing it borderline too ugly)
    • ExplainEverything (user limit), Jamboard (can't embed), groupboard.com (writing wasn't great), ipevo whiteboard (can't share?), miro/mural look like overkill.
• screen sharing via broadcast to youtube (until I find something better)

My solution for much of Fall 2020:

• OBS on Ubuntu
  • Connect ipad via this Airplay recevier on Ubuntu: https://github.com/RussTedrake/UxPlay
  • Share with Zoom via "Windowed Projector (Source)". Drag the window to make it big (full resolution) and to fit the content nicely. Then I can minimize it.
    • Note: windowed preview wasn't updating after a fresh reinstall; I had to install the proper nvidia drivers (from anzu/setup) to resolve the issue.
  • Google Hangouts meet speaker
  • Brio for video (through OBS? or directly?)

Or when I can get away with just slides / goodnotes:

• Zoom on mac, connect ipad with cable, show slides.com and goodnotes both directly from ipad.

I've tried a number of solutions.

• OBS
  • Never worked well for me on mac; at least not on the macbook air. It might have been starved of resources.
  • I got things working beautifully on ubuntu, and could push to YouTube at a nice screen quality.
  • The sharing to Zoom, both with the virtual camera and the desktop sharing, resulted in a dramatic loss of resolution. To the point where it was unusable. Update: Seems to be resolved with version 26.0.2
• OBS Streaming => youtube for sharing ipad, etc in slides.com as an iframe
  • important: in streaming settings on youtube, click "stream latency: ultra-low latency".
• Mmhmm
  • Again, resolution of the screen share with zoom was a bottleneck
• Zoom (only) on mac
  • Worked for me for a while. Painful switch between ipad and slides. Fan is always on and loud; the machine sounds like it's dying. Active dis-incentive to have meshcat open.
  • Airplay sharing of ipad stopped working when I upgraded zoom to 5.3.1 . I spent some time trying to downgrade but gave up.
  • Have been sharing ipad via usb, with a usb3 splitter sharing a port between Brio and ipad.
• Zoom (only) on Ubuntu.
  • Brio video
  • Google Hangouts meet speaker
  • Connect ipad via this Airplay recevier on Ubuntu: https://github.com/antimof/UxPlay
  • Couldn't find the gstreamer window as an option for window sharing.