How to Build OpenRave 0.9 Yourself

Overview

This blog covers instruction of how to build OpenRave 0.9 from Personal Robotics Lab yourself on a Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) machine since the binary is not provided. The instruction is made by guessing and trying, so there might be some little bugs. I’m too lazy to write a shell script to do all of the things, so just get your hands dirty and follow it step by step.

Before you start

Make sure your Python is the one that comes with the system, which should be the case for most of the people. If you are a person like me who uses the fantastic pyenv, just run pyenv shell system.

Get dependencies

• Add usr/local/bin to your $PATH

echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin"" >> ~/.bashrc

If you’re using fish, you can just run set -U fish_user_paths /usr/local/bin $fish_user_paths instead.

• Get Coin3D. Unzip it.
• Go inside the folder, run ./configure
• To solve potential compilation issues, change the following:

• File include/Inventor/SbBasic.h, add in line 26:

  #include <Inventor/C/errors/debugerror.h>

• File “src/fonts/freetype.cpp”, add in line 50:

  #include <cstdlib>

  The code in this lines will be:

  #ifdef __cplusplus
  #include <cstdlib>
  extern "C" {
  #endif /* __cplusplus */>

• then run make, then sudo make install
• Get SoXt. Unzip it.
• Go inside the folder, run ./configure, then run make, then sudo make install

• Install ODE:

  # ode - Will need to install ODE from sources (do not use the one in the package manager)
  wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/opende/ODE/0.11.1/ode-0.11.1.tar.bz2
  tar xjf ode-0.11.1.tar.bz2
  cd ode-0.11.1
  ./configure --with-libccd=cyl-cyl --with-trimesh=opcode --enable-new-trimesh --disable-demos --enable-shared --with-arch=nocona --enable-release --enable-malloc --enable-ou --disable-asserts --with-pic --enable-double-precision
  make -j4
  sudo make install

• Install Python dependencies: sudo apt-get install libboost-python-dev python python-dev python-numpy ipython python-scipy

Build openrave

git clone git@github.com:personalrobotics/openrave.git
cd openrave
make
make install

Then add the OPENRAVE_DATA variable to your bashrc, note here the directory includes a /local part.

echo "export OPENRAVE_DATA=/usr/local/share/openrave-0.9/data/" >> ~/.bashrc

If you’re using other shells such as zsh or fish, I think you know what to do.

Happy OpenRaving!