sai2-interfaces provides two main tools to enables users to quickly develop controllers and simulations with the sai libraries:

1. Wrappers for controller setup (around sai2-primitives library), simulation (around sai2-simulation library) and graphic visualization (around sai2-graphics library). The code for those is in the src/ folder. Those wrappers enable:

• Easy setup and configuration of controllers and simulated worlds from xml/urdf files
• A lot of interactability with the controllers and simulation/visualization via redis
• Built-in data logging functionality
• Automatic generation of a html file for web-based ui interaction with the controller and simulation/visualization

2. A web browser based user interface to interact in real time with the controllers and simulation/visualization. The code for this is in the ui/ folder. It is split in two parts:

• The backend server running locally (no internet connection required at runtime) with python
• The frontend composed of a collection of custom html/css elements such as sliders, toggle buttons, tabs to switch between controllers and so on

The web based ui has been tested on Chrome/Chromium, Firefox and Safari. The backend server requires Python 3.5 .

The UI backend server depends on Redis, Flask, and Click. You can install them as below:

pip3 install -r ui/requirements.txt

The C libraries depend on:

• sai2-simulation
• sai2-graphics
• sai2-primitives

You will need to build those first.

Build the project with the following commands

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make -j4

This will build the wrappers for the controllers and simviz, the MainInterface program, and will export ${SAI2-INTERFACES_UI_DIR} , which points to the absolute path of the ui/ folder in this repository. You can then use cmake's FILE(CREATE_LINK) macro to make a symlink to this directory from another application for easy access (recommended, for an example see the CMakeLists.txt file of OpenSai), or the FILE(COPY) macro to copy it.

The build process will also build the MainRedisInterfaceExample. This is the program to run for all examples. The examples are actually defined in config files, present in the examples/config_files/ folder. To run an example, you can follow these instructions:

cd build/examples/
./MainRedisInterfaceExample

This will run the panda_simviz_control config file that simulates and controls a Panda robot. If you want to run another example, let's sau the double_kuka_simviz_control.xml, you can add it as an argument in the call of the example:

./MainRedisInterfaceExample double_kuka_simviz_control.xml

You can interact with the controller, the simulation and even reset the simulation or swap the config file at runtime via the ui interface. To run the interface, open a new terminal, go to the sai2-interfaces root folder and launch the python server to serve the automatically generated webui file:

python3 ui/server.py examples/config_files/webui_generated_file/webui.html

Now, open a web browser and navigate to the url localhost:8000. You should see something like the following:

• For an overview of the ui and how to use it, see this page
• For details on the config files, how to use them and how to make your own for your application, see here
• For details on all the UI custom html elements (advanced users only), see the documentation here.

Currently pending licensing. PLEASE DO NOT DISTRIBUTE.

• Mikael Jorda
• Keven Wang
• William Jen

[email protected] or [email protected]