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Status

Experimental

EXPERIMENTAL: This status indicates that this software is experimental code at best. There are known issues and missing functionality. The APIs are completely unstable and likely to change. Use in production systems is not recommended. All code starts at this level. For more information see the ROS-Industrial software status page.

Contents

  1. Status
  2. Overview
    1. Logo
    2. Video demonstration
  3. Dependencies
    1. VTK 7.1
    2. wstool
    3. rosdep
  4. Compiling
    1. Resolve ROS dependencies
    2. Compile
  5. Using the Qt GUI user application
  6. Running the tests locally
    1. How to contribute

Overview

This repository is part of the ROS-Industrial program. This project has been developed by the Institut Maupertuis, a French research institute that is working on robotic industrial processes.

ROS Additive Manufacturing (RAM) provides a set of tools (mostly algorithms and GUIs) to help end users create complex trajectories for additive manufacturing. The project is especially focused on printing metallic parts with industrial robots. This project contains multiple tools: path planning algorithm able to generate complex trajectories, visualisation tools, editing tools, etc.

As of today this project aims at generating a robot program specific to the robot brand you use, and then upload/run the program on the robot. It's not designed to directly control your robot, though it would be possible quite easily.

RAM logo

Video demonstration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U0zRbDbjQs

Dependencies

This package has been tested with Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic.

VTK 7.1

You need VTK 7.1 or higher in order to compile this project.

Here are quick steps to download, compile and install VTK latest release: 

sudo apt install -y libglew-dev libxt-dev libqt5x11extras5
mkdir -p $HOME/libraries/VTK-8.1/build_release
cd $HOME/libraries/VTK-8.1/
wget http://www.vtk.org/files/release/8.1/VTK-8.1.0.zip
unzip VTK-8.1.0.zip
mv VTK-8.1.0 src
cd build_release
cmake ../src -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j4

Install with: 

sudo make -j4 install
sudo ldconfig

wstool

Install wstool.

rosdep

Install, initialize and update rosdep.

Compiling

Create a catkin workspace and clone the project: 

mkdir -p catkin_workspace/src
cd catkin_workspace/src
git clone https://gitlab.com/InstitutMaupertuis/ros_additive_manufacturing.git
cd ..

Resolve ROS dependencies

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro melodic -y

Compile

Use catkin_make to compile 

catkin_make

Using the Qt GUI user application

Source the catkin workspace in which you compiled the package, then launch: 

roslaunch ram_qt_guis gui.launch

There is desktop a file installed when installing the project: you can open the software like any other application using the application menu.

If you delete the installed files from your workspace the desktop launcher will not be deleted. It is located in $HOME/.local/share/applications; you need to remove this file manually.

Running the tests locally

The tests can be run locally with a GUI; for each package that allows that the commands are detailed in a README file; for example in ram_path_planning/README.md

Please check inside the repository if there is a README file in the package you are interested in testing!

How to contribute

2024-12-07 18:16