Simulation Lab (SL) is a robotics simulator and a real time control engine that is used by the IAS lab. It was originally developed by Stefan Schaal and colleagues at USC, and it is used at various institutions (e.g. Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen, CMU in the USA, ATR in Japan, etc.), allowing for easy cooperation and joint projects between those labs.

SL can be used in two different modes: simulation and real time control. In simulation, new tasks and methods can be tried out on models of the available robots before testing on the actual real system, thereby making the setup of potentially dangerous (to the robot or its environment) or time consuming experiments more comfortable. However, SL and its concept may take some time getting used to in the beginning. SL runs on Linux and MacOS, and it is currently distributed internally.

• Installation Guide
• SL book
• Documentation

• We recommend to use Homebrew to install packages /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

All packages installed using brew install go into /usr/local. You should never need to use sudo with brew.

• Install CMake
  brew update brew install cmake
• Install XQuartz (required to show graphics)
• Install freeglut brew install homebrew/X11/freeglut
• In order for SL to find X11 and freeglut, you need to create a symlink to the folder with these libraries
  mkdir /opt/local
ln -s /opt/X11/lib /opt/local/lib

Make sure that /opt/X11/bin is in your PATH by running echo $PATH. If it is not, add line export PATH=$PATH:/opt/X11/bin to ~/.profile and restart Terminal.

• Install readline
  brew install readline

• Change the shared memory size by editing /etc/sysctl.conf and adding
  sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf
kern.sysv.shmmax=2147483648
kern.sysv.shmall=524288
kern.sysv.shmmni=128
kern.sysv.shmseg=32

• For older version of OSX (prior to 10.4)
  sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf
kernel.shmmax=2147483648
kernel.shmall=524288
kern.sysv.shmmni=128
kern.sysv.shmseg=32

If you want to know more about shared memory on Mac OS X, read

• Configuring Shared Memory on Mac OS X
• Adjusting Shared memory segment values.

• Restart the computer. Check if you configured shared memory correctly by running sysctl kern.sysv.shmmax. Similarly, you can check other variables.

• Install the following dependencies
  sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libreadline6-dev freeglut3-dev libxmu-dev cmake cmake-curses-gui libedit-dev libstd++-6-dev clang xterm
• Change the shared memory size
  sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf
kernel.shmmax=2147483648
kernel.shmall=2147483648
• Restart the computer

• Go to your sl folder and run
  mkdir build
cd build
ccmake ..
• The CMake interface up will open and you can edit compiling preferences. You can choose which Matlab version to use or which task to compile for each robot. The first time do
  • c (configure)
  • select the robots to build (eg, BUILD_barrett)
  • c
  • select the tasks to build (eg, barrett_gen_matlab)
  • g (generate)

It can happen that the Matlab root is not automatically recognized and you receive an error at the second c. If that happens, press e to exit the message and manually set the Matlab root. Also, if you want to compile a robot task which needs Matlab, you have to enable the Matlab interface (eg, BUILD_MATLAB_INTERFACE_barrett) or the task will not be compiled (you will not receive any compilation from CMake, though).

• It is recommended to change CMAKE_C_COMPILER and CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER to clang and clang++ by toggling the advanced preferences (t)
• You are then ready to build
  make install
• You can also build a single robot from its folder
  cd sl/build/barrett
make install
• Finally, to run a robot
  cd sl/build/barrett
./xbarrett

Do ccmake press t and add to C_FLAGS
-Dchar16_t=uint16_T

• sudo nano /etc/security/limits.conf
• Add anywhere the following two lines
  * - rtprio 99
* - memlock unlimited