A simple rigid body dynamics simulator based on microblx, for the UR5 robot.

This repository may serve as a starting point to develop a more generic simulation/control system for articulated robots, based on the microblx framework.

• microblx, the framework with which the application in this repository is built.

• Eigen and the iit-rbd library. These are required to build the C++ dynamics engine of the robot, which is included in this repository.

• odeint, which is used for the integration of the forward dynamics of the robot.

• meshcat, the application providing the 3D visualization of the robot meshes.

• msgpack C++, used to serialize the commands for Meshcat

• The robot-model-tools, required to load the robot model into Meshcat.
  Please switch to the branch meshcat-viewer.

1. After cloning this repository, use cmake to build and install the libmeshcatcpp included with the robot-model-tools (in etc/libmeshcat).
   This library enables communication (via ZMQ) between a C++ client and the Meshcat application.

2. Use cmake to build and install the UR5 dynamics library, whose sources are under rcgen/cpp/. This is C++ code that was generated using RobCoGen

3. Install microblx according to its documentation

4. Install the microblx blocks provided in this repository:

   cd microblx/
   ./bootstrap.sh
   

5. Download here the meshes for the UR5 robot, and copy them in the meshes/ subdirectory.

1. From the root, please execute ./meshcat.sh. The robot-model-tools and Meshcat itself must be in the current Python path (you may want to use a virtual environment).
   Open the browser at the specified URL. You should be able to see the robot.

2. Launch the actual microblx application

   cd microblx/
   ubx-launch -c ur5-sim.usc,ur5-sim__mix-ptrig.usc
   

   The robot should now start to move.