sdu_controllers

sdu_controllers is a C++ library that implements fundamental robot controllers. The library is developed and maintained by the SDU Robotics group at University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Python bindings and a MATLAB Simulink interface is provided making it possible to use it as a Python library or in Simulink with very little overhead.

Prerequisites

Building sdu_controllers requires the following software installed:

• A C++17-compliant compiler
• CMake >= 3.9
• Eigen3 >= 3.3 for linear algebra.
• yaml-cpp for loading robot models.
• Doxygen (optional, documentation building is skipped if missing)
• Python >= 3.8 for building Python bindings

Building sdu_controllers

Dependencies

In order to build sdu_controllers you must first install the dependencies, see how to do that on your operating system here:

Ubuntu

sudo apt update && sudo apt install libeigen3-dev libyaml-cpp-dev

Windows

vcpkg install eigen3 yaml-cpp

macOS

brew install eigen yaml-cpp

If you plan to build tests and python bindings you must install Catch2 and nanobind with:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Build procedure

The following sequence of commands builds sdu_controllers. It assumes that your current working directory is the top-level directory of the freshly cloned repository:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build .

The build process can be customized with the following CMake variables, which can be set by adding -D<var>={ON, OFF} to the cmake call:

• BUILD_TESTING: Enable building of the test suite (default: ON)
• BUILD_DOCS: Enable building the documentation (default: ON)
• BUILD_PYTHON: Enable building the Python bindings (default: ON)
• BUILD_EXAMPLES: Enable building the examples (default: ON)

For some controllers, hardware specific examples have been implemented which can be run on a real robot. These are disabled by default.

• BUILD_UR_EXAMPLES: Enable building UR specific examples (default: OFF)

If you wish to build and install the project as a Python project without having access to C++ build artifacts like libraries and executables, you can do so using pip from the root directory:

python -m pip install .

Testing sdu_controllers

When built according to the above explanation (with -DBUILD_TESTING=ON), the C++ test suite of sdu_controllers can be run using ctest from the build directory:

cd build
ctest

The Python test suite can be run by first pip-installing the Python package and then running pytest from the top-level directory:

python -m pip install .
pytest

Documentation

sdu_controllers provides a Sphinx-based documentation, that can be browsed online at readthedocs.org. To build it locally, first ensure the requirements are installed by running this command from the top-level source directory:

pip install -r doc/requirements.txt

Then build the sphinx documentation from the top-level build directory:

cmake --build . --target sphinx-doc

The web documentation can then be browsed by opening doc/sphinx/index.html in your browser.