coop_assembly: Geometry generation of robotically assembled spatial structures.
News:
9-21-2019: This package contains materials for the FABRICATION-INFORMED DESIGN OF ROBOTICALLY ASSEMBLED STRUCTURES for the Design Modeling Symposium Berlin 2019.
Prerequisites
- Operating System:
- Windows 10 and Mac(!)
- Rhinoceros 3D 6.0
- We will use Rhino / Grasshopper as a frontend for inputting geometric and numeric paramters, and use various python packages as the computational backends. The tight integration between Grasshopper and python environments is made possible by COMPAS and COMPAS_FAB.
- Git
- We need
Git
for fetching required packages from github.
- Miniconda
- We will install all the required python packages using Miniconda (a light version of Anaconda). Miniconda uses environments to create isolated spaces for projects' depedencies.
- Microsoft Visual Studio Build tools
- Our simulation environment
pybullet
has a C++ backend, which needsMicrosoft Visual C++ 14.0
to compile and build the python bindings. Note that this is needed only for Windows OS.
Working in a conda environment
It is recommended to set up a conda environment to create a clean, isolated space for installing all the required python packages. We've provided a conda environment file to make this process easy - please do the following steps:
Type in the following commands in your Anaconda terminal
(search for Anaconda Prompt
in the Windows search bar):
git clone https://github.com/createchaos/coop_assembly.git cd coop_assembly conda env create -f coop_assembly_ws.yml
Wait for the building process to finish, the command above will fetch and build all the required packages, which will take some time (5~10 mins).
If you see an error message like Error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required
,
please see troubleshooting for instructions to install the Microsoft Visual Studio Build tools.
Then, activate the newly created conda environment (with all the needed packages installed):
conda activate coop_assembly_ws
Great - we are almost there! Now type python in your Anaconda Prompt, and test if the installation went well:
>>> import compas >>> import compas_fab >>> import pybullet >>> import coop_assembly >>> import ikfast_ur5
If that doesn't fail, you're good to go! Exit the python interpreter (either typing exit() or pressing CTRL+Z followed by Enter).
Now let's make all the installed packages available inside Rhino. Still from the Anaconda Prompt, type the following:
In order to make coop_assembly
accessible in Rhino/Grasshopper,
we need the run the following commands in the Anaconda prompt first
and then restart Rhino:
python -m compas_rhino.install python -m compas_rhino.install -p coop_assembly ur_online_control compas_fab roslibpy
And you should be able to see outputs like:
Installing COMPAS packages to Rhino 6.0 IronPython lib: IronPython location: C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\6.0\Plug-ins\IronPython (814d908a-e25c-493d-97e9-ee3861957f49)\settings\lib compas OK compas_rhino OK compas_ghpython OK compas_bootstrapper OK coop_assembly OK Completed.
Congrats! 🎉 You are all set!
Grasshopper examples can be found in examples\workshop_dms
.
Sometimes things don't go as expected. Checkout the troubleshooting documentation for answers to the most common issues you might bump into.
This package was created by Stefana Parascho <[email protected]> @stefanaparascho at the CREATE lab, Princeton University with collaborators.