HRS_ST3AL

Running the upper body imitation pipeline

This tutorial guides you through the necessary setup in order to run the upper body imitation on the Ainex Robot.

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, ensure you have a working ROS2 environment installed.

Build and Run

Step 1: Environment Setup and Build

The MediaPipe library does not come packaged with ROS2 and need to be installed separately (preferably in a virtual environment). In this step, we will set up a virtual environment, install dependencies, and build the ROS2 workspace.

1. Create and Activate Virtual Environment: Navigate to your workspace src folder and create the environment:

   cd src
   python3 -m venv .venv --system-site-packages --symlinks
   source .venv/bin/activate

   WARNING: It is important that the virtual environment is placed correctly inside "src" and is named ".venv". If not, the launch description will not find it!

2. Install MediaPipe: With the virtual environment active, install the required libraries:

   pip install mediapipe pin casadi "numpy<2"

3. Build the Workspace: Return to the root of your workspace and build the packages:

   cd ..
   colcon build

4. Source the Setup Script: Overlay the workspace environment:

   source install/setup.bash

Step 2: Run the launch file

Run the launch file from the root of the project:

ros2 launch bringup upper_body_imitation.launch.py

Running the cube stacking pipeline

stacking_smaller_02.mp4

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have a working ROS 2 environment.

The only external dependency required for this pipeline is Pinocchio, installed system-wide via robotpkg.

---

Install Pinocchio (robotpkg)

If you already have robotpkg configured, skip to Step 5.

1) Install required tools

sudo apt install -qqy lsb-release curl

2) Register the robotpkg signing key

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/robotpkg.asc \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/robotpkg.asc

3) Add robotpkg as an APT repository

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/robotpkg.asc] http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub $(lsb_release -cs) robotpkg" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/robotpkg.list

4) Update package list

sudo apt update

5) Install Pinocchio

sudo apt install -qqy robotpkg-py3*-pinocchio

This installs Pinocchio and all required dependencies.

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Additional dependencies

Make sure the following libraries are available:

• numpy
• scipy
• opencv

Most of these dependencies are already included in a standard ROS 2 installation.

Run the pipeline

1. Build your workspace:

colcon build

2. Source the workspace:

source install/setup.bash

3. Launch the stacking pipeline:

ros2 launch bringup stacking_pipeline.launch.py gui:=false rviz:=false

Run the whole setup using a state machine.