coop_assembly

coop_assembly: Geometry generation of robotically assembled spatial structures.

News:

9-21-2019: This package contains materials for the FABRICATION-INFORMED DESIGN OF ROBOTICALLY ASSEMBLED STRUCTURES for the Design Modeling Symposium Berlin 2019.

Installation

Prerequisites

0. Operating System:

   Windows 10 and Mac(!)

1. Rhinoceros 3D 6.0

   We will use Rhino / Grasshopper as a frontend for inputting geometric and numeric paramters, and use various python packages as the computational backends. The tight integration between Grasshopper and python environments is made possible by COMPAS and COMPAS_FAB.

2. Git

   We need Git for fetching required packages from github.

3. Miniconda

   We will install all the required python packages using Miniconda (a light version of Anaconda). Miniconda uses environments to create isolated spaces for projects' depedencies.

4. Microsoft Visual Studio Build tools

   Our simulation environment pybullet has a C++ backend, which needs Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 to compile and build the python bindings. Note that this is needed only for Windows OS.

Working in a conda environment

It is recommended to set up a conda environment to create a clean, isolated space for installing all the required python packages. We've provided a conda environment file to make this process easy - please do the following steps:

Type in the following commands in your Anaconda terminal (search for Anaconda Prompt in the Windows search bar):

git clone https://github.com/createchaos/coop_assembly.git
cd coop_assembly
conda env create -f coop_assembly_ws.yml

Wait for the building process to finish, the command above will fetch and build all the required packages, which will take some time (5~10 mins).

If you see an error message like Error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required, please see troubleshooting for instructions to install the Microsoft Visual Studio Build tools.

Then, activate the newly created conda environment (with all the needed packages installed):

conda activate coop_assembly_ws

Great - we are almost there! Now type python in your Anaconda Prompt, and test if the installation went well:

>>> import compas
>>> import compas_fab
>>> import pybullet
>>> import coop_assembly
>>> import ikfast_ur5

If that doesn't fail, you're good to go! Exit the python interpreter (either typing exit() or pressing CTRL+Z followed by Enter).

Now let's make all the installed packages available inside Rhino. Still from the Anaconda Prompt, type the following:

In order to make coop_assembly accessible in Rhino/Grasshopper, we need the run the following commands in the Anaconda prompt first and then restart Rhino:

python -m compas_rhino.install
python -m compas_rhino.install -p coop_assembly ur_online_control compas_fab roslibpy

And you should be able to see outputs like:

Installing COMPAS packages to Rhino 6.0 IronPython lib:
IronPython location: C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Roaming\McNeel\Rhinoceros\6.0\Plug-ins\IronPython (814d908a-e25c-493d-97e9-ee3861957f49)\settings\lib

compas               OK
compas_rhino         OK
compas_ghpython      OK
compas_bootstrapper  OK
coop_assembly        OK

Completed.

Congrats! 🎉 You are all set!

Grasshopper examples can be found in examples\workshop_dms.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes things don't go as expected. Checkout the troubleshooting documentation for answers to the most common issues you might bump into.

Credits

This package was created by Stefana Parascho <parascho@princeton.edu> @stefanaparascho at the CREATE lab, Princeton University with collaborators.